#voila norbert extension

[marketncard]

Norbert Lead Generation- Viola Norbert 2023 | Lead generation and email outreach tool

Norbert Lead Generation – The business world today has become highly competitive. For this reason, lead generation has taken the top stage in marketing as businesses need a constant flow of new customers or “leads” to stay afloat and generate revenue. However, lead generation can be a daunting task, especially for small businesses that lack the resources and manpower to execute a successful…

[hammadchauhdary]

Best Email Finder Tools: Finding Email Addresses

In an interconnected world driven by digital communication, accessing accurate email addresses is paramount for effective outreach and networking. Whether you're reaching out to potential clients, collaborators, or recruiters, harnessing the right tools can streamline your efforts and amplify your impact. Here are some of the best email finder tools to elevate your outreach game:

Hunter.io: With its vast database and user-friendly interface, Hunter.io allows you to find email addresses associated with a specific domain effortlessly. Simply enter the domain name, and Hunter.io provides a list of verified email addresses associated with that domain.

Snov.io: Snov.io offers a comprehensive suite of email outreach tools, including an email finder feature that enables you to search for email addresses by name and company. Its advanced search filters and Chrome extension make prospecting and lead generation seamless.

Clearbit Connect: Clearbit Connect integrates seamlessly with Gmail, providing real-time enrichment data and email finding capabilities within your inbox. By simply typing in a company name or domain, Clearbit Connect retrieves relevant contact information, including email addresses and social media profiles.

Voila Norbert: Voila Norbert specializes in email address verification and enrichment, helping you find and verify email addresses with precision. Its intuitive interface and bulk search functionality make it ideal for large-scale prospecting campaigns.

Find That Email: Find That Email offers a straightforward email finding solution, allowing you to search for email addresses by entering a person's name and their company website. With its built-in verification tool, you can ensure the accuracy of your contact list.

In conclusion, leveraging email finder tools empowers you to expand your network, nurture relationships, and drive business growth. By incorporating these top email finder tools into your outreach strategy, you can unlock the power of connectivity and propel your endeavors to new heights.

Best Email Finder Tools for Seamless Outreach: Unlocking the Power of Connectivity"

[fozzieio]

Are you looking for Lusha top alternatives?

Lusha is a popular tool for finding contact information, primarily email addresses and phone numbers, for professionals and businesses. Here are some potential alternatives to Lusha for finding contact information:

1. Hunter (formerly known as Email Hunter): Hunter allows you to find email addresses associated with a specific domain or company. It also provides a verification feature to check the deliverability of email addresses.

2. Clearbit Connect: Clearbit offers a suite of data enrichment tools, including Clearbit Connect, which helps you find email addresses, job titles, and other information about prospects. It integrates with popular email platforms like Gmail.

3. ZoomInfo: ZoomInfo provides a database of company and contact information, including email addresses, phone numbers, and company details. It's often used for sales and marketing purposes.

4. Find That Email: This tool allows you to search for email addresses by entering a person's name and their company domain. It also offers a Chrome extension for easy access.

5. Snov.io: Snov.io offers a range of email finder and outreach tools, including an email verifier, to help you find and verify email addresses. It integrates with various platforms and offers a Google Chrome extension.

6. Adapt.io: Adapt.io provides contact information for businesses and professionals, including email addresses and phone numbers. It's often used for lead generation and sales prospecting.

7. RocketReach: RocketReach helps you find email addresses, phone numbers, and social media profiles of professionals and businesses. It also offers a Chrome extension for easy access.

8. Voila Norbert: This tool specializes in finding email addresses by entering the person's name and their company's domain. It verifies email addresses for deliverability.

9. GetProspect: GetProspect is a LinkedIn email finder that helps you extract contact information, including email addresses, from LinkedIn profiles. It's particularly useful for B2B lead generation.

10. Lead411: Lead411 provides contact information for businesses and professionals, with a focus on company news and updates that can be useful for sales and marketing efforts. Read the Lusha top alternatives at Fozzie.io. Before choosing an alternative to Lusha, we recommend checking the latest reviews, pricing, and features to determine which one best suit your needs and budget. Additionally, ensure that you comply with privacy and data protection regulations when using such tools for contact information retrieval.

[dailynewsresearch]

[Leadfeeder, Prospect.Io, Reply.Io, Voila Norbert] Lead Generation Tools Competitive Market Insight| 2023-2033

Lead Generation Tools Market Overview

Market.Biz has recently updated a research report titled “Global Lead Generation Tools Market By Type (Marketing Automation Tools, Lead Data Collection Tools), By Application (SMBs, Lage Organizations)- Segment industry, competition scenario and forecast for 2032" evaluating various factors that affect its trajectory. The global industry report offers a comprehensive, accurate, and high-quality research study to equip players with valuable information for making strategic business decisions. Research analysts have provided in-depth segmental analysis of the industry on the basis of type, application, and geography. 

Light is also shed on the vendor landscape to inform readers about future changes in business competition. As part of the competitive analysis, the report includes detailed company profiles of top players of the global Lead Generation Tools Market. Players can also use the value chain analysis and Porter's Five Forces Analysis given in the report to strengthen their position in the global industry.

Leading players of the global Lead Generation Tools Market are analyzed taking into account their market share, recent developments, new product launches, partnerships, mergers or acquisitions, and markets served. We also provide a comprehensive analysis of their product portfolios to explore the products and applications they focus on when operating in the global marketplace. Furthermore, the report offers two separate industry forecasts – one for the production side and one for the consumption side of the global industry. It also provides useful recommendations for new and established players of the global market.

Lead Generation Tools Competitive Market Outlook, Product Types And Applications

GuysApplicationscompaniesLead Data Collection Tools Marketing Automation ToolsSMEs Large OrganizationsLeadfeeder Prospect.io Reply.io Voila Norbert HubSpot Albacross Discover.ly WisePops OptinMonster Lusha Hello Bar ReferralCandy Jotform Hunter Skrapp Hunter.io

Report Buy Now To Get The Best Discount:  https://market.biz/checkout/?reportId=661905&type=Single%20User

All segments studied in the research study are analyzed on the basis of market share, revenue, and other important factors. Our research study shows how different segments are contributing to the growth of the global Lead Generation Tools market. It also provides information on key trends related to the segments included in the report. This helps business players to focus on high-growth areas of the global market. The research study also offers a separate analysis of the segments based on absolute dollar opportunity.

The report authors have analyzed the developed and developing regions considered for research and analysis of the global Lead Generation Tools market. The regional analysis section of the report provides extensive research study on different global regional and country markets to help players plan effective expansion strategies. In addition, it offers highly accurate estimates of CAGR, market share, and market size for key regions and countries. Players can use this study to explore untapped global Lead Generation Tools markets to broaden their reach and create sales opportunities.

What to Expect From Our Report?

(1) An entire section of the global Lead Generation Tools business report is dedicated to market dynamics, including influencers, market drivers, challenges, opportunities, and trends.

(2) Another broad section of the research study is reserved for regional analysis of the Global Lead Generation Tools industry, where important regions and countries are evaluated for their growth potential, consumption, industry share, and other vital factors. that indicate the growth of your market.

(3) Players can use the competitive analysis provided in the report to create new strategies or adjust existing ones to overcome market challenges and increase their share in the global Lead Generation Tools industry.

(4) The report also analyzes the competitive situations and trends and throws light on the expansions and mergers and acquisitions of companies taking place in the global Lead Generation Tools market. Furthermore, it brings to light the industry concentration rate and the market shares of the top three and top five players.

(5) Readers are provided with the results and conclusion of the research study provided in the global Lead Generation Tools market report.

Inquire Here If You Have Any Inquiries@  https://market.biz/report/global-lead-generation-tools-market-gm/#inquiry

[superspunarticle]

5 Advanced Methods to Promote Your Content in 2018

Content marketing tutorials & tips.

Yet another tutorial received from Content Marketing Institute. Most probably among the most important generators of content on the Internet.

Just because you create content doesn’t mean anyone will see it. People have to know the content exists in order to consume it.

The digital landscape is increasingly competitive. If you want your content to drive maximum value, finding opportunities to engage audiences is just as critical as the content itself.

Here are five advanced methods that belong in every marketer’s content promotion strategy.

HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT:

Road Map to Success: Content Distribution Essentials That Win Eyeballs

19 Favorite Tools for Content Promotion in 2018

1. Involve influencers in content promotion early

Most content marketers are familiar with influencer outreach. But if you treat it as something you do after you publish your content, you’re missing an opportunity.

I like to reach out before I start writing. When you reach out at the beginning of content creation, you can:

Quickly determine whether you’re creating content on topics your industry will find interesting (versus writing for writing’s sake)

Gauge which influencers are excited enough that they’ll be interested in promoting the content once it’s finished

Ask for a comment or example to include in the piece

Invite them to review a final draft before publishing the content (Everyone loves to feel like their opinions are valuable, and doing this will get them excited about the promotion you’re going to do next.)

Two tools I can’t live without for influencer outreach are Mailshake and Voila Norbert. I use Mailshake for my email campaigns and Voila Norbert for finding influencers’ emails.

Once your content is published, reach out to the influencers you partnered with in the creative process. Let them know you appreciated their input and included it in your final content (if they haven’t already seen it).

Ask them to read, share, and link to your content if it’s something they find mutually beneficial. Then, ask if you can reach out again in the future. You’d be surprised at how effective this tactic can be.

If you start #influencer outreach after you publish your #content, you’re missing out, says @SujanPatel. Click To Tweet

HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT:

An 8-Step Process to Use Influencers to Elevate Your Brand

2 Simple-to-Implement Checklists to Use in Your Influencer Marketing Planning

2. Contribute to content sharing communities

Publishing content on your own site may not be enough to get the level of engagement you want. If that’s the case, you’ll have to find a way to get your content in front of a bigger audience.

Content sharing communities are great outlets for amplifying your voice. They give you an opportunity to share your message with an extensive network of like-minded individuals who submit and share similar content pieces.

Some popular communities include:

HubPages

GrowthHackers

Flipboard

Medium

Reddit

Blog Engage

Triberr

Some of these sites are free; others are paid. Choose not by price, but by where members of your audience are active. Then, learn the ropes of these and any other communities you choose to be a part of. That way, your content will be seen as a valuable contribution, not self-promotion.

Learn the ropes of #content-sharing communities so you add value rather than just self- promote @SujanPatel. Click To Tweet

HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT: Reddit for Marketing? Hell No, Except in This One Case

3. Create content snippet variants

Content snippets present your work in an easily digestible format that’s easy to share (and, therefore, likely to improve your overall click-throughs). Creating multiple variants of each tweet or social post lets you test the engagement level of each variation and develop your sharing strategies over time.

When generating multiple content snippets, try these tactics:

Create multiple titles (vary both length and complexity).

Incorporate relevant questions related to the subject matter.

Use statistics in your messaging.

Add a call to action.

Create 20 to 30 variants to test in different places. Track the success of each one, keeping in mind the context of the life cycle on each content-sharing platform (I do this in Google Sheets). For example, after just 2.5 hours, a Facebook post usually hits 75% of its maximum impressions, while Twitter engagements reach their half-life in only 24 minutes.

HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT: 4 Unconventional Ways to Promote Blog Content on Social Media

4. Update and expand existing posts

Marketers who regularly update older content into new formats are 74% more likely to see positive results. Repurposing your content breathes new life into past work through fresh perspectives, updated case studies, or expanded information.

Marketers who update #content into new formats are 74% more likely to see positive results. @orbiteers Click To Tweet

Updating posts gives me an opportunity to promote them again, getting the content in front of people who might not have seen it before. And it doesn’t hurt that it’s a lot less work to create new content from old than to start from scratch.

For even greater benefit, don’t just update your past content (although there’s SEO benefit to doing that). Take the time to transform it into 10X content, providing a deep dive through new infographics, videos, e-books, or other advanced resources for greater impact.

Put a strategy in place to make sure this isn’t something that falls through the cracks:

Add a monthly review to your calendar so you remember to look through old posts for update or expansion opportunities.

Keep an eye on news in your industry and quickly update older content when new developments invalidate your assertions or change your recommendations.

Make a note during content creation if you see easy opportunities to take the piece further in the future.

HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT: How to Find and Reuse Your Best Content [Tools]

5. Say yes to opportunities

While the purpose of your content marketing strategy should be to provide highly relevant and useful information for your readers, it can open up marketing benefits in other areas, too.

Producing great quality content can lead to:

Spots in coveted link roundups on top-tier websites

Speaking opportunities at conferences in your industry

Invitations to appear on podcasts

Guest spots on webinars with other influencers

Book publishing opportunities

These outcomes may or may not promote your content directly. Regardless, they improve brand awareness and make your future marketing efforts more impactful. I can tell you that with certainty, because it has worked for me.

But it won’t happen by accident. If you produce mediocre content, don’t expect big results.

If you produce mediocre #content, don’t expect big results, says @SujanPatel. Click To Tweet

If you only create content for the marketing impact, your followers and even the influencers you want to partner with will notice. Have a clear purpose for creating content (whether that’s educating readers, breaking down myths and misconceptions, or something else). Use that purpose to build relationships – whether that’s with your own audience or the audiences you’ve been invited to address – that go beyond content promotion.

The real value of this approach isn’t necessarily the value of the content itself. It’s what these opportunities can lead to – if you leverage them wisely.

HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT: How to Know If Your Content Impacts Brand Awareness [Tools]

Content promotion: Beyond the basics

Content promotion has to be dynamic. Adapt your strategies over time as you exhaust the potential of common tactics. When you put the emphasis not just on content creation but also on how content can be used to grow your business, opportunities for more advanced forms of promotion will become obvious.

What other advanced content promotion methods would you add to this list? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT: Road Map to Success: Content Distribution Essentials That Win Eyeballs

Please note: All tools included in our blog posts are suggested by authors, not the CMI editorial team. No one post can provide all relevant tools in the space. Feel free to include additional tools in the comments (from your company or ones that you have used).

Get all the latest content planning, creation, and promotion tips. Subscribe to CMI’s weekday e-newsletter today.

Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute

[Read More …]

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Let me have your reaction below, share a quick comment and let us know what things you want covered in up coming articles.

5 Advanced Methods to Promote Your Content in 2018 was originally posted by SSA-Blogger: CMI+SEMrush+ChrisMarr+CopyPress

[noithatotoaz]

How to Get Results from Broken Link Building

Broken link building is one of those link building tactics that is difficult to execute, as it’s time-consuming and the results can often be disappointing.

If you ask link building experts about their experience with this strategy, their responses will vary. While some say that it’s a waste of time, others insist that it still works for them.

This leads to comments such as these on public forums:

Truth is, a broken link building campaign will be effective and get you great results if you approach it the right way. Otherwise, you’ll just be wasting time and resources.

In this post, I’ll show you the exact process you can use to get results with broken link building, including:

How to find resource pages at scale

How to get broken link building opportunities from resource pages

How to analyze your competitors’ link profiles for broken links

Best practices that help you succeed with broken link building

What is broken link building?

Broken link building is the process of finding broken or dead outbound links on another website, informing the website owners/managers about them, and recommending a similar article you’ve written as a replacement for that broken link.

For instance, in this blog post on Mention about building an email list, I found a link to Neil Patel’s blog:

When I clicked on the link, I was redirected to this 404 page:

As you can see, the page no longer exists, but a reputable publication still links to it.

In this instance, this was a case study that was published on the blog about how their team increased Tech Crunch’s organic traffic by 30% within 60 days.

If you’re a marketing agency and have a similar case study you’ve published recently, you can reach out to websites still linking to this post and offer yours as a replacement. That way, you help them fix an issue on their website and get a backlink in return.

Broken link building is effective because it’s focused on adding value and reciprocity. You’re not just asking the other person to link to you, rather you’re giving them value upfront and even suggesting how they can make the user experience on their website better.

Even if they decide not to link to you, they’ll appreciate the help identifying broken links they may have missed.

Take this email I got recently as an example:

As you can see, they came across a post on my blog about conversational marketing and found a broken link in it. They reached out to inform me about it and suggested one of their articles as a replacement.

If I decide to link to them, it’s a win-win for both parties. From my end, I’m able to fix the broken link, which helps with a better user experience, and they’ve successfully secured a backlink.

How to find broken link opportunities at scale

Your ability to find broken link opportunities at scale will determine whether you’ll succeed with this strategy. The reason is simple: Broken link building is a numbers game. The more opportunities you can find, the higher your chances of getting backlinks in return.

1. Scraping resource pages

A resource page is usually a static page on a website that curates different resources on specific topics with links to the original sources.

Here’s a good example from Learning SEO, where Aleyda Solis curated the top resources and guides about SEO:

As you can see, she’s linking to other relevant articles about keyword research from this section of the resource page.

How exactly do you discover resource pages at scale?

To discover resource pages, you can make use of Google search operators. These help you uncover lots of resource page opportunities faster by extending the capabilities of a regular Google search. For reference, here’s a comprehensive list of 67 Google search operators.

Let’s use the intitle operator as an example. By typing “broken link building intitle:resources” into the search bar, the SERP shows pages that have “resources” in their title and are related to broken link building.

Here’s what that looks like:

How can you find broken link building opportunities from these resource pages?

Let’s assume that you want to explore the broken link opportunities from the Citation Labs broken link building resource page.

All you need to do is open the page and start checking the links one after the other. Once you identify any broken link, you can note it down. Using that strategy definitely works, but it takes time.

Alternatively, you can use chrome extensions such as Check My Links or Link Miner for this process.

With Link Miner, I was able to spot these three opportunities on the page above:

When I clicked on one of those red links shown above, here’s what I found:

If you have a page that’s a match or similar in topic, you can reach out to Citation Labs, inform them about the broken link, and suggest your page as a replacement.

Here’s where it gets more interesting.

If there are other websites linking to that broken link page, you can reach out to them using the same process above. All you need to do is use any of the SEO tools such as Moz, SEMrush, Ahrefs, etc., to identify other websites linking to the page.

When I checked one of the broken links in the resource page on Moz, here’s what I found:

As you can see, there are about 15 other websites linking to this broken link. I’ve now unlocked 15 more opportunities from one broken link alone.

2. Competitor link profile analysis

Using SEO tools, you can easily analyze a competitor’s link profile to identify the broken links they have. Once you do, you can create a similar page, then reach out to all the websites linking to the broken page to notify them about the broken link, and ask them to link to you instead.

This is what the process looks like on Moz: Link research > Top pages > Enter root domain or specific URL > Change status code to “4xx - broken”.

For example, if you’re a prospecting tool, one of your competitors is Ontolo.

Using the process above on Moz, you can easily identify some of the broken links on the website:

As you can see, one of the broken links has more than 100 websites still linking to it. You can identify these links by clicking on “View Links”. Once done, you can use Wayback Machine to find out exactly what the page looked like in the past, and then recreate it.

Using the Wayback machine, I discovered one of the broken links above was a free tool to check duplicate URLs in a list.

So, let’s say this is your niche and you want to take advantage of the links to this dead page. All you need to do is recreate a similar tool, and follow the process outlined above.

Best practices to help you succeed with broken link building

Reach out to the right person

If you contact the wrong person, getting a response will be difficult. For a broken link building campaign, you want to reach out to someone who’s in charge of inbound marketing or manages the content publishing process in a company.

Reaching out to someone in a more senior role such as VP Marketing, Director of Marketing, Head of Content, etc., in a large company almost guarantees that you won’t get a response.

To identify the right person to contact, you can check the company’s About Us or team page on their website. Alternatively, you can check the company’s LinkedIn page.

After identifying the right contact person, you can use email finding tools such as Hunter, Skrapp, Voila Norbert, and so on to find their email address.

When sending a cold email, make sure you comply with the ethical requirements of the CAN-SPAM Act. This means that your cold emails:

Shouldn’t use a misleading subject line

Should have an accurate sender information

Should include your company’s physical address

Should make it easy for recipients to opt-out from receiving your emails

Send a great outreach email

Many outreach emails get marked as spam. So, sending an amazing, personalized outreach email that adds value for the recipient will make you stand out instantly and will put you in a better position to land that broken link.

To make your emails stand, you should:

Use a clear and click worthy subject line.

Address the recipient by their first name.

Mention something unique which you found about them on social media or elsewhere .

Compliment them if possible, but make sure it doesn’t sound generic.

Keep your outreach emails short and straight to the point.

Use the inverted pyramid style of writing. Begin your email with the most important points.

Be explicit about what you want.

Here’s an example email template you can use to acquire broken links from resource pages:

Subject line: Found this broken link on [website name]

Hey [First Name],

Just found out that the link on your website to [Mention website name with 404 page] doesn’t work anymore:

[insert URL of the broken link]

Here’s a screenshot of the page: [Insert link to a screenshot]

Came across this while going through some of the links you mentioned on [topic of their resource page]:

[insert URL of their resources page]

So, I recently created a comprehensive guide on [mention your website] that will be a perfect replacement for the 404 page. [Include additional comment on why your content deserves to make it on their list of resources].

[insert URL to your page]

I believe that your visitors will find it useful.

Either way, keep up the amazing job you’re doing curating the best resources on the internet about [topic of their resource page].

Let me know if there’s anything else I can help you with.

Thanks, [First Name]!

[Your Name]

Offer similar content as a replacement

The mistake most people make with broken link building campaigns is suggesting content that isn’t a good replacement for the dead page. If you do this, most people won’t bother responding to your email outreach, and even if they do respond, they most likely won’t link to you.

Before you begin that broken link campaign, make sure you find out what content was existing on the dead page. If you have something similar, you can send it to them as a replacement. Else, you should consider creating an amazing piece of content from scratch.

That way, you’re adding more value upfront, and stand a better chance of getting more website owners to link to you.

To figure out the exact content to recreate, you can use the Wayback machine.

All you need to do is enter the URL of the 404 page on the search bar in the tool, and click on “Browse History”:

Once you do, it’ll show you exactly what was existing on the dead page previously.

For example, this screenshot below is a 404 page on Drift’s website.

I found the broken link from this article.

To know what was existing on this page, I searched for its previous history using the Wayback machine and this is what I discovered:

As you can see, the post is an in-depth guide on “Demand Generation” covering the following sub-topics:

What is demand generation?

Why is demand generation important?

Who’s responsible for demand generation?

How to do demand generation

Implement strategic demand generation tactics

Demand generation vs. Lead generation

Demand generation metrics: how to measure your efforts

Demand gen benchmarking: how are companies like yours generating demand?

Demand generation tools & technologies

To recreate this page, you'll need to write an in-depth piece of content on demand generation covering these sub-topics and more. That way, the website(s) linking to the broken link will be happy to link to yours instead. This is because you've provided a replacement that’ll add value to their audience.

In contrast, if you reach out to these websites and suggest your service page as a replacement for the broken link, they’d most likely not link to it.

Send follow-up emails

Don’t send one email and call it a day. Rather, you should have a follow-up sequence (think two to four emails) in place to remind the people you’ve reached out to previously about your email, and why a broken link on their page isn’t great for user experience.

Doing this helps you land more links. This is because the person you reached out to has a lot going on in their life, and might have skipped responding to your initial email. By following up with them, you’ll be top of mind, and if your pitch is a good fit, they’ll be more likely to respond to you.

Conclusion

It’s rare to find a website without a broken link. The reason is simple: most website owners and blog managers link to external content from their pages and don’t really monitor the content they linked to months and years ago.

In some cases, these pieces of content no longer exist online because they were created for a short-term purpose, or perhaps are no longer relevant.

This is a goldmine you can tap into as a marketer. By finding these broken link opportunities the right way, you can build relevant links for your website and pages to help you rank higher in the SERPs.

Join the conversation: Tweet your questions and comments about broken link building using #MozBlog!

[thanhtuandoan89]

How to Get Results from Broken Link Building

Broken link building is one of those link building tactics that is difficult to execute, as it’s time-consuming and the results can often be disappointing.

If you ask link building experts about their experience with this strategy, their responses will vary. While some say that it’s a waste of time, others insist that it still works for them.

This leads to comments such as these on public forums:

Truth is, a broken link building campaign will be effective and get you great results if you approach it the right way. Otherwise, you’ll just be wasting time and resources.

In this post, I’ll show you the exact process you can use to get results with broken link building, including:

How to find resource pages at scale

How to get broken link building opportunities from resource pages

How to analyze your competitors’ link profiles for broken links

Best practices that help you succeed with broken link building

What is broken link building?

Broken link building is the process of finding broken or dead outbound links on another website, informing the website owners/managers about them, and recommending a similar article you’ve written as a replacement for that broken link.

For instance, in this blog post on Mention about building an email list, I found a link to Neil Patel’s blog:

When I clicked on the link, I was redirected to this 404 page:

As you can see, the page no longer exists, but a reputable publication still links to it.

In this instance, this was a case study that was published on the blog about how their team increased Tech Crunch’s organic traffic by 30% within 60 days.

If you’re a marketing agency and have a similar case study you’ve published recently, you can reach out to websites still linking to this post and offer yours as a replacement. That way, you help them fix an issue on their website and get a backlink in return.

Broken link building is effective because it’s focused on adding value and reciprocity. You’re not just asking the other person to link to you, rather you’re giving them value upfront and even suggesting how they can make the user experience on their website better.

Even if they decide not to link to you, they’ll appreciate the help identifying broken links they may have missed.

Take this email I got recently as an example:

As you can see, they came across a post on my blog about conversational marketing and found a broken link in it. They reached out to inform me about it and suggested one of their articles as a replacement.

If I decide to link to them, it’s a win-win for both parties. From my end, I’m able to fix the broken link, which helps with a better user experience, and they’ve successfully secured a backlink.

How to find broken link opportunities at scale

Your ability to find broken link opportunities at scale will determine whether you’ll succeed with this strategy. The reason is simple: Broken link building is a numbers game. The more opportunities you can find, the higher your chances of getting backlinks in return.

1. Scraping resource pages

A resource page is usually a static page on a website that curates different resources on specific topics with links to the original sources.

Here’s a good example from Learning SEO, where Aleyda Solis curated the top resources and guides about SEO:

As you can see, she’s linking to other relevant articles about keyword research from this section of the resource page.

How exactly do you discover resource pages at scale?

To discover resource pages, you can make use of Google search operators. These help you uncover lots of resource page opportunities faster by extending the capabilities of a regular Google search. For reference, here’s a comprehensive list of 67 Google search operators.

Let’s use the intitle operator as an example. By typing “broken link building intitle:resources” into the search bar, the SERP shows pages that have “resources” in their title and are related to broken link building.

Here’s what that looks like:

How can you find broken link building opportunities from these resource pages?

Let’s assume that you want to explore the broken link opportunities from the Citation Labs broken link building resource page.

All you need to do is open the page and start checking the links one after the other. Once you identify any broken link, you can note it down. Using that strategy definitely works, but it takes time.

Alternatively, you can use chrome extensions such as Check My Links or Link Miner for this process.

With Link Miner, I was able to spot these three opportunities on the page above:

When I clicked on one of those red links shown above, here’s what I found:

If you have a page that’s a match or similar in topic, you can reach out to Citation Labs, inform them about the broken link, and suggest your page as a replacement.

Here’s where it gets more interesting.

If there are other websites linking to that broken link page, you can reach out to them using the same process above. All you need to do is use any of the SEO tools such as Moz, SEMrush, Ahrefs, etc., to identify other websites linking to the page.

When I checked one of the broken links in the resource page on Moz, here’s what I found:

As you can see, there are about 15 other websites linking to this broken link. I’ve now unlocked 15 more opportunities from one broken link alone.

2. Competitor link profile analysis

Using SEO tools, you can easily analyze a competitor’s link profile to identify the broken links they have. Once you do, you can create a similar page, then reach out to all the websites linking to the broken page to notify them about the broken link, and ask them to link to you instead.

This is what the process looks like on Moz: Link research > Top pages > Enter root domain or specific URL > Change status code to “4xx - broken”.

For example, if you’re a prospecting tool, one of your competitors is Ontolo.

Using the process above on Moz, you can easily identify some of the broken links on the website:

As you can see, one of the broken links has more than 100 websites still linking to it. You can identify these links by clicking on “View Links”. Once done, you can use Wayback Machine to find out exactly what the page looked like in the past, and then recreate it.

Using the Wayback machine, I discovered one of the broken links above was a free tool to check duplicate URLs in a list.

So, let’s say this is your niche and you want to take advantage of the links to this dead page. All you need to do is recreate a similar tool, and follow the process outlined above.

Best practices to help you succeed with broken link building

Reach out to the right person

If you contact the wrong person, getting a response will be difficult. For a broken link building campaign, you want to reach out to someone who’s in charge of inbound marketing or manages the content publishing process in a company.

Reaching out to someone in a more senior role such as VP Marketing, Director of Marketing, Head of Content, etc., in a large company almost guarantees that you won’t get a response.

To identify the right person to contact, you can check the company’s About Us or team page on their website. Alternatively, you can check the company’s LinkedIn page.

After identifying the right contact person, you can use email finding tools such as Hunter, Skrapp, Voila Norbert, and so on to find their email address.

When sending a cold email, make sure you comply with the ethical requirements of the CAN-SPAM Act. This means that your cold emails:

Shouldn’t use a misleading subject line

Should have an accurate sender information

Should include your company’s physical address

Should make it easy for recipients to opt-out from receiving your emails

Send a great outreach email

Many outreach emails get marked as spam. So, sending an amazing, personalized outreach email that adds value for the recipient will make you stand out instantly and will put you in a better position to land that broken link.

To make your emails stand, you should:

Use a clear and click worthy subject line.

Address the recipient by their first name.

Mention something unique which you found about them on social media or elsewhere .

Compliment them if possible, but make sure it doesn’t sound generic.

Keep your outreach emails short and straight to the point.

Use the inverted pyramid style of writing. Begin your email with the most important points.

Be explicit about what you want.

Here’s an example email template you can use to acquire broken links from resource pages:

Subject line: Found this broken link on [website name]

Hey [First Name],

Just found out that the link on your website to [Mention website name with 404 page] doesn’t work anymore:

[insert URL of the broken link]

Here’s a screenshot of the page: [Insert link to a screenshot]

Came across this while going through some of the links you mentioned on [topic of their resource page]:

[insert URL of their resources page]

So, I recently created a comprehensive guide on [mention your website] that will be a perfect replacement for the 404 page. [Include additional comment on why your content deserves to make it on their list of resources].

[insert URL to your page]

I believe that your visitors will find it useful.

Either way, keep up the amazing job you’re doing curating the best resources on the internet about [topic of their resource page].

Let me know if there’s anything else I can help you with.

Thanks, [First Name]!

[Your Name]

Offer similar content as a replacement

The mistake most people make with broken link building campaigns is suggesting content that isn’t a good replacement for the dead page. If you do this, most people won’t bother responding to your email outreach, and even if they do respond, they most likely won’t link to you.

Before you begin that broken link campaign, make sure you find out what content was existing on the dead page. If you have something similar, you can send it to them as a replacement. Else, you should consider creating an amazing piece of content from scratch.

That way, you’re adding more value upfront, and stand a better chance of getting more website owners to link to you.

To figure out the exact content to recreate, you can use the Wayback machine.

All you need to do is enter the URL of the 404 page on the search bar in the tool, and click on “Browse History”:

Once you do, it’ll show you exactly what was existing on the dead page previously.

For example, this screenshot below is a 404 page on Drift’s website.

I found the broken link from this article.

To know what was existing on this page, I searched for its previous history using the Wayback machine and this is what I discovered:

As you can see, the post is an in-depth guide on “Demand Generation” covering the following sub-topics:

What is demand generation?

Why is demand generation important?

Who’s responsible for demand generation?

How to do demand generation

Implement strategic demand generation tactics

Demand generation vs. Lead generation

Demand generation metrics: how to measure your efforts

Demand gen benchmarking: how are companies like yours generating demand?

Demand generation tools & technologies

To recreate this page, you'll need to write an in-depth piece of content on demand generation covering these sub-topics and more. That way, the website(s) linking to the broken link will be happy to link to yours instead. This is because you've provided a replacement that’ll add value to their audience.

In contrast, if you reach out to these websites and suggest your service page as a replacement for the broken link, they’d most likely not link to it.

Send follow-up emails

Don’t send one email and call it a day. Rather, you should have a follow-up sequence (think two to four emails) in place to remind the people you’ve reached out to previously about your email, and why a broken link on their page isn’t great for user experience.

Doing this helps you land more links. This is because the person you reached out to has a lot going on in their life, and might have skipped responding to your initial email. By following up with them, you’ll be top of mind, and if your pitch is a good fit, they’ll be more likely to respond to you.

Conclusion

It’s rare to find a website without a broken link. The reason is simple: most website owners and blog managers link to external content from their pages and don’t really monitor the content they linked to months and years ago.

In some cases, these pieces of content no longer exist online because they were created for a short-term purpose, or perhaps are no longer relevant.

This is a goldmine you can tap into as a marketer. By finding these broken link opportunities the right way, you can build relevant links for your website and pages to help you rank higher in the SERPs.

Join the conversation: Tweet your questions and comments about broken link building using #MozBlog!

[drummcarpentry]

How to Get Results from Broken Link Building

Broken link building is one of those link building tactics that is difficult to execute, as it’s time-consuming and the results can often be disappointing.

If you ask link building experts about their experience with this strategy, their responses will vary. While some say that it’s a waste of time, others insist that it still works for them.

This leads to comments such as these on public forums:

Truth is, a broken link building campaign will be effective and get you great results if you approach it the right way. Otherwise, you’ll just be wasting time and resources.

In this post, I’ll show you the exact process you can use to get results with broken link building, including:

How to find resource pages at scale

How to get broken link building opportunities from resource pages

How to analyze your competitors’ link profiles for broken links

Best practices that help you succeed with broken link building

What is broken link building?

Broken link building is the process of finding broken or dead outbound links on another website, informing the website owners/managers about them, and recommending a similar article you’ve written as a replacement for that broken link.

For instance, in this blog post on Mention about building an email list, I found a link to Neil Patel’s blog:

When I clicked on the link, I was redirected to this 404 page:

As you can see, the page no longer exists, but a reputable publication still links to it.

In this instance, this was a case study that was published on the blog about how their team increased Tech Crunch’s organic traffic by 30% within 60 days.

If you’re a marketing agency and have a similar case study you’ve published recently, you can reach out to websites still linking to this post and offer yours as a replacement. That way, you help them fix an issue on their website and get a backlink in return.

Broken link building is effective because it’s focused on adding value and reciprocity. You’re not just asking the other person to link to you, rather you’re giving them value upfront and even suggesting how they can make the user experience on their website better.

Even if they decide not to link to you, they’ll appreciate the help identifying broken links they may have missed.

Take this email I got recently as an example:

As you can see, they came across a post on my blog about conversational marketing and found a broken link in it. They reached out to inform me about it and suggested one of their articles as a replacement.

If I decide to link to them, it’s a win-win for both parties. From my end, I’m able to fix the broken link, which helps with a better user experience, and they’ve successfully secured a backlink.

How to find broken link opportunities at scale

Your ability to find broken link opportunities at scale will determine whether you’ll succeed with this strategy. The reason is simple: Broken link building is a numbers game. The more opportunities you can find, the higher your chances of getting backlinks in return.

1. Scraping resource pages

A resource page is usually a static page on a website that curates different resources on specific topics with links to the original sources.

Here’s a good example from Learning SEO, where Aleyda Solis curated the top resources and guides about SEO:

As you can see, she’s linking to other relevant articles about keyword research from this section of the resource page.

How exactly do you discover resource pages at scale?

To discover resource pages, you can make use of Google search operators. These help you uncover lots of resource page opportunities faster by extending the capabilities of a regular Google search. For reference, here’s a comprehensive list of 67 Google search operators.

Let’s use the intitle operator as an example. By typing “broken link building intitle:resources” into the search bar, the SERP shows pages that have “resources” in their title and are related to broken link building.

Here’s what that looks like:

How can you find broken link building opportunities from these resource pages?

Let’s assume that you want to explore the broken link opportunities from the Citation Labs broken link building resource page.

All you need to do is open the page and start checking the links one after the other. Once you identify any broken link, you can note it down. Using that strategy definitely works, but it takes time.

Alternatively, you can use chrome extensions such as Check My Links or Link Miner for this process.

With Link Miner, I was able to spot these three opportunities on the page above:

When I clicked on one of those red links shown above, here’s what I found:

If you have a page that’s a match or similar in topic, you can reach out to Citation Labs, inform them about the broken link, and suggest your page as a replacement.

Here’s where it gets more interesting.

If there are other websites linking to that broken link page, you can reach out to them using the same process above. All you need to do is use any of the SEO tools such as Moz, SEMrush, Ahrefs, etc., to identify other websites linking to the page.

When I checked one of the broken links in the resource page on Moz, here’s what I found:

As you can see, there are about 15 other websites linking to this broken link. I’ve now unlocked 15 more opportunities from one broken link alone.

2. Competitor link profile analysis

Using SEO tools, you can easily analyze a competitor’s link profile to identify the broken links they have. Once you do, you can create a similar page, then reach out to all the websites linking to the broken page to notify them about the broken link, and ask them to link to you instead.

This is what the process looks like on Moz: Link research > Top pages > Enter root domain or specific URL > Change status code to “4xx - broken”.

For example, if you’re a prospecting tool, one of your competitors is Ontolo.

Using the process above on Moz, you can easily identify some of the broken links on the website:

As you can see, one of the broken links has more than 100 websites still linking to it. You can identify these links by clicking on “View Links”. Once done, you can use Wayback Machine to find out exactly what the page looked like in the past, and then recreate it.

Using the Wayback machine, I discovered one of the broken links above was a free tool to check duplicate URLs in a list.

So, let’s say this is your niche and you want to take advantage of the links to this dead page. All you need to do is recreate a similar tool, and follow the process outlined above.

Best practices to help you succeed with broken link building

Reach out to the right person

If you contact the wrong person, getting a response will be difficult. For a broken link building campaign, you want to reach out to someone who’s in charge of inbound marketing or manages the content publishing process in a company.

Reaching out to someone in a more senior role such as VP Marketing, Director of Marketing, Head of Content, etc., in a large company almost guarantees that you won’t get a response.

To identify the right person to contact, you can check the company’s About Us or team page on their website. Alternatively, you can check the company’s LinkedIn page.

After identifying the right contact person, you can use email finding tools such as Hunter, Skrapp, Voila Norbert, and so on to find their email address.

When sending a cold email, make sure you comply with the ethical requirements of the CAN-SPAM Act. This means that your cold emails:

Shouldn’t use a misleading subject line

Should have an accurate sender information

Should include your company’s physical address

Should make it easy for recipients to opt-out from receiving your emails

Send a great outreach email

Many outreach emails get marked as spam. So, sending an amazing, personalized outreach email that adds value for the recipient will make you stand out instantly and will put you in a better position to land that broken link.

To make your emails stand, you should:

Use a clear and click worthy subject line.

Address the recipient by their first name.

Mention something unique which you found about them on social media or elsewhere .

Compliment them if possible, but make sure it doesn’t sound generic.

Keep your outreach emails short and straight to the point.

Use the inverted pyramid style of writing. Begin your email with the most important points.

Be explicit about what you want.

Here’s an example email template you can use to acquire broken links from resource pages:

Subject line: Found this broken link on [website name]

Hey [First Name],

Just found out that the link on your website to [Mention website name with 404 page] doesn’t work anymore:

[insert URL of the broken link]

Here’s a screenshot of the page: [Insert link to a screenshot]

Came across this while going through some of the links you mentioned on [topic of their resource page]:

[insert URL of their resources page]

So, I recently created a comprehensive guide on [mention your website] that will be a perfect replacement for the 404 page. [Include additional comment on why your content deserves to make it on their list of resources].

[insert URL to your page]

I believe that your visitors will find it useful.

Either way, keep up the amazing job you’re doing curating the best resources on the internet about [topic of their resource page].

Let me know if there’s anything else I can help you with.

Thanks, [First Name]!

[Your Name]

Offer similar content as a replacement

The mistake most people make with broken link building campaigns is suggesting content that isn’t a good replacement for the dead page. If you do this, most people won’t bother responding to your email outreach, and even if they do respond, they most likely won’t link to you.

Before you begin that broken link campaign, make sure you find out what content was existing on the dead page. If you have something similar, you can send it to them as a replacement. Else, you should consider creating an amazing piece of content from scratch.

That way, you’re adding more value upfront, and stand a better chance of getting more website owners to link to you.

To figure out the exact content to recreate, you can use the Wayback machine.

All you need to do is enter the URL of the 404 page on the search bar in the tool, and click on “Browse History”:

Once you do, it’ll show you exactly what was existing on the dead page previously.

For example, this screenshot below is a 404 page on Drift’s website.

I found the broken link from this article.

To know what was existing on this page, I searched for its previous history using the Wayback machine and this is what I discovered:

As you can see, the post is an in-depth guide on “Demand Generation” covering the following sub-topics:

What is demand generation?

Why is demand generation important?

Who’s responsible for demand generation?

How to do demand generation

Implement strategic demand generation tactics

Demand generation vs. Lead generation

Demand generation metrics: how to measure your efforts

Demand gen benchmarking: how are companies like yours generating demand?

Demand generation tools & technologies

To recreate this page, you'll need to write an in-depth piece of content on demand generation covering these sub-topics and more. That way, the website(s) linking to the broken link will be happy to link to yours instead. This is because you've provided a replacement that’ll add value to their audience.

In contrast, if you reach out to these websites and suggest your service page as a replacement for the broken link, they’d most likely not link to it.

Send follow-up emails

Don’t send one email and call it a day. Rather, you should have a follow-up sequence (think two to four emails) in place to remind the people you’ve reached out to previously about your email, and why a broken link on their page isn’t great for user experience.

Doing this helps you land more links. This is because the person you reached out to has a lot going on in their life, and might have skipped responding to your initial email. By following up with them, you’ll be top of mind, and if your pitch is a good fit, they’ll be more likely to respond to you.

Conclusion

It’s rare to find a website without a broken link. The reason is simple: most website owners and blog managers link to external content from their pages and don’t really monitor the content they linked to months and years ago.

In some cases, these pieces of content no longer exist online because they were created for a short-term purpose, or perhaps are no longer relevant.

This is a goldmine you can tap into as a marketer. By finding these broken link opportunities the right way, you can build relevant links for your website and pages to help you rank higher in the SERPs.

Join the conversation: Tweet your questions and comments about broken link building using #MozBlog!

[lakelandseo]

How to Get Results from Broken Link Building

Broken link building is one of those link building tactics that is difficult to execute, as it’s time-consuming and the results can often be disappointing.

If you ask link building experts about their experience with this strategy, their responses will vary. While some say that it’s a waste of time, others insist that it still works for them.

This leads to comments such as these on public forums:

Truth is, a broken link building campaign will be effective and get you great results if you approach it the right way. Otherwise, you’ll just be wasting time and resources.

In this post, I’ll show you the exact process you can use to get results with broken link building, including:

How to find resource pages at scale

How to get broken link building opportunities from resource pages

How to analyze your competitors’ link profiles for broken links

Best practices that help you succeed with broken link building

What is broken link building?

Broken link building is the process of finding broken or dead outbound links on another website, informing the website owners/managers about them, and recommending a similar article you’ve written as a replacement for that broken link.

For instance, in this blog post on Mention about building an email list, I found a link to Neil Patel’s blog:

When I clicked on the link, I was redirected to this 404 page:

As you can see, the page no longer exists, but a reputable publication still links to it.

In this instance, this was a case study that was published on the blog about how their team increased Tech Crunch’s organic traffic by 30% within 60 days.

If you’re a marketing agency and have a similar case study you’ve published recently, you can reach out to websites still linking to this post and offer yours as a replacement. That way, you help them fix an issue on their website and get a backlink in return.

Broken link building is effective because it’s focused on adding value and reciprocity. You’re not just asking the other person to link to you, rather you’re giving them value upfront and even suggesting how they can make the user experience on their website better.

Even if they decide not to link to you, they’ll appreciate the help identifying broken links they may have missed.

Take this email I got recently as an example:

As you can see, they came across a post on my blog about conversational marketing and found a broken link in it. They reached out to inform me about it and suggested one of their articles as a replacement.

If I decide to link to them, it’s a win-win for both parties. From my end, I’m able to fix the broken link, which helps with a better user experience, and they’ve successfully secured a backlink.

How to find broken link opportunities at scale

Your ability to find broken link opportunities at scale will determine whether you’ll succeed with this strategy. The reason is simple: Broken link building is a numbers game. The more opportunities you can find, the higher your chances of getting backlinks in return.

1. Scraping resource pages

A resource page is usually a static page on a website that curates different resources on specific topics with links to the original sources.

Here’s a good example from Learning SEO, where Aleyda Solis curated the top resources and guides about SEO:

As you can see, she’s linking to other relevant articles about keyword research from this section of the resource page.

How exactly do you discover resource pages at scale?

To discover resource pages, you can make use of Google search operators. These help you uncover lots of resource page opportunities faster by extending the capabilities of a regular Google search. For reference, here’s a comprehensive list of 67 Google search operators.

Let’s use the intitle operator as an example. By typing “broken link building intitle:resources” into the search bar, the SERP shows pages that have “resources” in their title and are related to broken link building.

Here’s what that looks like:

How can you find broken link building opportunities from these resource pages?

Let’s assume that you want to explore the broken link opportunities from the Citation Labs broken link building resource page.

All you need to do is open the page and start checking the links one after the other. Once you identify any broken link, you can note it down. Using that strategy definitely works, but it takes time.

Alternatively, you can use chrome extensions such as Check My Links or Link Miner for this process.

With Link Miner, I was able to spot these three opportunities on the page above:

When I clicked on one of those red links shown above, here’s what I found:

If you have a page that’s a match or similar in topic, you can reach out to Citation Labs, inform them about the broken link, and suggest your page as a replacement.

Here’s where it gets more interesting.

If there are other websites linking to that broken link page, you can reach out to them using the same process above. All you need to do is use any of the SEO tools such as Moz, SEMrush, Ahrefs, etc., to identify other websites linking to the page.

When I checked one of the broken links in the resource page on Moz, here’s what I found:

As you can see, there are about 15 other websites linking to this broken link. I’ve now unlocked 15 more opportunities from one broken link alone.

2. Competitor link profile analysis

Using SEO tools, you can easily analyze a competitor’s link profile to identify the broken links they have. Once you do, you can create a similar page, then reach out to all the websites linking to the broken page to notify them about the broken link, and ask them to link to you instead.

This is what the process looks like on Moz: Link research > Top pages > Enter root domain or specific URL > Change status code to “4xx - broken”.

For example, if you’re a prospecting tool, one of your competitors is Ontolo.

Using the process above on Moz, you can easily identify some of the broken links on the website:

As you can see, one of the broken links has more than 100 websites still linking to it. You can identify these links by clicking on “View Links”. Once done, you can use Wayback Machine to find out exactly what the page looked like in the past, and then recreate it.

Using the Wayback machine, I discovered one of the broken links above was a free tool to check duplicate URLs in a list.

So, let’s say this is your niche and you want to take advantage of the links to this dead page. All you need to do is recreate a similar tool, and follow the process outlined above.

Best practices to help you succeed with broken link building

Reach out to the right person

If you contact the wrong person, getting a response will be difficult. For a broken link building campaign, you want to reach out to someone who’s in charge of inbound marketing or manages the content publishing process in a company.

Reaching out to someone in a more senior role such as VP Marketing, Director of Marketing, Head of Content, etc., in a large company almost guarantees that you won’t get a response.

To identify the right person to contact, you can check the company’s About Us or team page on their website. Alternatively, you can check the company’s LinkedIn page.

After identifying the right contact person, you can use email finding tools such as Hunter, Skrapp, Voila Norbert, and so on to find their email address.

When sending a cold email, make sure you comply with the ethical requirements of the CAN-SPAM Act. This means that your cold emails:

Shouldn’t use a misleading subject line

Should have an accurate sender information

Should include your company’s physical address

Should make it easy for recipients to opt-out from receiving your emails

Send a great outreach email

Many outreach emails get marked as spam. So, sending an amazing, personalized outreach email that adds value for the recipient will make you stand out instantly and will put you in a better position to land that broken link.

To make your emails stand, you should:

Use a clear and click worthy subject line.

Address the recipient by their first name.

Mention something unique which you found about them on social media or elsewhere .

Compliment them if possible, but make sure it doesn’t sound generic.

Keep your outreach emails short and straight to the point.

Use the inverted pyramid style of writing. Begin your email with the most important points.

Be explicit about what you want.

Here’s an example email template you can use to acquire broken links from resource pages:

Subject line: Found this broken link on [website name]

Hey [First Name],

Just found out that the link on your website to [Mention website name with 404 page] doesn’t work anymore:

[insert URL of the broken link]

Here’s a screenshot of the page: [Insert link to a screenshot]

Came across this while going through some of the links you mentioned on [topic of their resource page]:

[insert URL of their resources page]

So, I recently created a comprehensive guide on [mention your website] that will be a perfect replacement for the 404 page. [Include additional comment on why your content deserves to make it on their list of resources].

[insert URL to your page]

I believe that your visitors will find it useful.

Either way, keep up the amazing job you’re doing curating the best resources on the internet about [topic of their resource page].

Let me know if there’s anything else I can help you with.

Thanks, [First Name]!

[Your Name]

Offer similar content as a replacement

The mistake most people make with broken link building campaigns is suggesting content that isn’t a good replacement for the dead page. If you do this, most people won’t bother responding to your email outreach, and even if they do respond, they most likely won’t link to you.

Before you begin that broken link campaign, make sure you find out what content was existing on the dead page. If you have something similar, you can send it to them as a replacement. Else, you should consider creating an amazing piece of content from scratch.

That way, you’re adding more value upfront, and stand a better chance of getting more website owners to link to you.

To figure out the exact content to recreate, you can use the Wayback machine.

All you need to do is enter the URL of the 404 page on the search bar in the tool, and click on “Browse History”:

Once you do, it’ll show you exactly what was existing on the dead page previously.

For example, this screenshot below is a 404 page on Drift’s website.

I found the broken link from this article.

To know what was existing on this page, I searched for its previous history using the Wayback machine and this is what I discovered:

As you can see, the post is an in-depth guide on “Demand Generation” covering the following sub-topics:

What is demand generation?

Why is demand generation important?

Who’s responsible for demand generation?

How to do demand generation

Implement strategic demand generation tactics

Demand generation vs. Lead generation

Demand generation metrics: how to measure your efforts

Demand gen benchmarking: how are companies like yours generating demand?

Demand generation tools & technologies

To recreate this page, you'll need to write an in-depth piece of content on demand generation covering these sub-topics and more. That way, the website(s) linking to the broken link will be happy to link to yours instead. This is because you've provided a replacement that’ll add value to their audience.

In contrast, if you reach out to these websites and suggest your service page as a replacement for the broken link, they’d most likely not link to it.

Send follow-up emails

Don’t send one email and call it a day. Rather, you should have a follow-up sequence (think two to four emails) in place to remind the people you’ve reached out to previously about your email, and why a broken link on their page isn’t great for user experience.

Doing this helps you land more links. This is because the person you reached out to has a lot going on in their life, and might have skipped responding to your initial email. By following up with them, you’ll be top of mind, and if your pitch is a good fit, they’ll be more likely to respond to you.

Conclusion

It’s rare to find a website without a broken link. The reason is simple: most website owners and blog managers link to external content from their pages and don’t really monitor the content they linked to months and years ago.

In some cases, these pieces of content no longer exist online because they were created for a short-term purpose, or perhaps are no longer relevant.

This is a goldmine you can tap into as a marketer. By finding these broken link opportunities the right way, you can build relevant links for your website and pages to help you rank higher in the SERPs.

Join the conversation: Tweet your questions and comments about broken link building using #MozBlog!

[epackingvietnam]

How to Get Results from Broken Link Building

Broken link building is one of those link building tactics that is difficult to execute, as it’s time-consuming and the results can often be disappointing.

If you ask link building experts about their experience with this strategy, their responses will vary. While some say that it’s a waste of time, others insist that it still works for them.

This leads to comments such as these on public forums:

Truth is, a broken link building campaign will be effective and get you great results if you approach it the right way. Otherwise, you’ll just be wasting time and resources.

In this post, I’ll show you the exact process you can use to get results with broken link building, including:

How to find resource pages at scale

How to get broken link building opportunities from resource pages

How to analyze your competitors’ link profiles for broken links

Best practices that help you succeed with broken link building

What is broken link building?

Broken link building is the process of finding broken or dead outbound links on another website, informing the website owners/managers about them, and recommending a similar article you’ve written as a replacement for that broken link.

For instance, in this blog post on Mention about building an email list, I found a link to Neil Patel’s blog:

When I clicked on the link, I was redirected to this 404 page:

As you can see, the page no longer exists, but a reputable publication still links to it.

In this instance, this was a case study that was published on the blog about how their team increased Tech Crunch’s organic traffic by 30% within 60 days.

If you’re a marketing agency and have a similar case study you’ve published recently, you can reach out to websites still linking to this post and offer yours as a replacement. That way, you help them fix an issue on their website and get a backlink in return.

Broken link building is effective because it’s focused on adding value and reciprocity. You’re not just asking the other person to link to you, rather you’re giving them value upfront and even suggesting how they can make the user experience on their website better.

Even if they decide not to link to you, they’ll appreciate the help identifying broken links they may have missed.

Take this email I got recently as an example:

As you can see, they came across a post on my blog about conversational marketing and found a broken link in it. They reached out to inform me about it and suggested one of their articles as a replacement.

If I decide to link to them, it’s a win-win for both parties. From my end, I’m able to fix the broken link, which helps with a better user experience, and they’ve successfully secured a backlink.

How to find broken link opportunities at scale

Your ability to find broken link opportunities at scale will determine whether you’ll succeed with this strategy. The reason is simple: Broken link building is a numbers game. The more opportunities you can find, the higher your chances of getting backlinks in return.

1. Scraping resource pages

A resource page is usually a static page on a website that curates different resources on specific topics with links to the original sources.

Here’s a good example from Learning SEO, where Aleyda Solis curated the top resources and guides about SEO:

As you can see, she’s linking to other relevant articles about keyword research from this section of the resource page.

How exactly do you discover resource pages at scale?

To discover resource pages, you can make use of Google search operators. These help you uncover lots of resource page opportunities faster by extending the capabilities of a regular Google search. For reference, here’s a comprehensive list of 67 Google search operators.

Let’s use the intitle operator as an example. By typing “broken link building intitle:resources” into the search bar, the SERP shows pages that have “resources” in their title and are related to broken link building.

Here’s what that looks like:

How can you find broken link building opportunities from these resource pages?

Let’s assume that you want to explore the broken link opportunities from the Citation Labs broken link building resource page.

All you need to do is open the page and start checking the links one after the other. Once you identify any broken link, you can note it down. Using that strategy definitely works, but it takes time.

Alternatively, you can use chrome extensions such as Check My Links or Link Miner for this process.

With Link Miner, I was able to spot these three opportunities on the page above:

When I clicked on one of those red links shown above, here’s what I found:

If you have a page that’s a match or similar in topic, you can reach out to Citation Labs, inform them about the broken link, and suggest your page as a replacement.

Here’s where it gets more interesting.

If there are other websites linking to that broken link page, you can reach out to them using the same process above. All you need to do is use any of the SEO tools such as Moz, SEMrush, Ahrefs, etc., to identify other websites linking to the page.

When I checked one of the broken links in the resource page on Moz, here’s what I found:

As you can see, there are about 15 other websites linking to this broken link. I’ve now unlocked 15 more opportunities from one broken link alone.

2. Competitor link profile analysis

Using SEO tools, you can easily analyze a competitor’s link profile to identify the broken links they have. Once you do, you can create a similar page, then reach out to all the websites linking to the broken page to notify them about the broken link, and ask them to link to you instead.

This is what the process looks like on Moz: Link research > Top pages > Enter root domain or specific URL > Change status code to “4xx - broken”.

For example, if you’re a prospecting tool, one of your competitors is Ontolo.

Using the process above on Moz, you can easily identify some of the broken links on the website:

As you can see, one of the broken links has more than 100 websites still linking to it. You can identify these links by clicking on “View Links”. Once done, you can use Wayback Machine to find out exactly what the page looked like in the past, and then recreate it.

Using the Wayback machine, I discovered one of the broken links above was a free tool to check duplicate URLs in a list.

So, let’s say this is your niche and you want to take advantage of the links to this dead page. All you need to do is recreate a similar tool, and follow the process outlined above.

Best practices to help you succeed with broken link building

Reach out to the right person

If you contact the wrong person, getting a response will be difficult. For a broken link building campaign, you want to reach out to someone who’s in charge of inbound marketing or manages the content publishing process in a company.

Reaching out to someone in a more senior role such as VP Marketing, Director of Marketing, Head of Content, etc., in a large company almost guarantees that you won’t get a response.

To identify the right person to contact, you can check the company’s About Us or team page on their website. Alternatively, you can check the company’s LinkedIn page.

After identifying the right contact person, you can use email finding tools such as Hunter, Skrapp, Voila Norbert, and so on to find their email address.

When sending a cold email, make sure you comply with the ethical requirements of the CAN-SPAM Act. This means that your cold emails:

Shouldn’t use a misleading subject line

Should have an accurate sender information

Should include your company’s physical address

Should make it easy for recipients to opt-out from receiving your emails

Send a great outreach email

Many outreach emails get marked as spam. So, sending an amazing, personalized outreach email that adds value for the recipient will make you stand out instantly and will put you in a better position to land that broken link.

To make your emails stand, you should:

Use a clear and click worthy subject line.

Address the recipient by their first name.

Mention something unique which you found about them on social media or elsewhere .

Compliment them if possible, but make sure it doesn’t sound generic.

Keep your outreach emails short and straight to the point.

Use the inverted pyramid style of writing. Begin your email with the most important points.

Be explicit about what you want.

Here’s an example email template you can use to acquire broken links from resource pages:

Subject line: Found this broken link on [website name]

Hey [First Name],

Just found out that the link on your website to [Mention website name with 404 page] doesn’t work anymore:

[insert URL of the broken link]

Here’s a screenshot of the page: [Insert link to a screenshot]

Came across this while going through some of the links you mentioned on [topic of their resource page]:

[insert URL of their resources page]

So, I recently created a comprehensive guide on [mention your website] that will be a perfect replacement for the 404 page. [Include additional comment on why your content deserves to make it on their list of resources].

[insert URL to your page]

I believe that your visitors will find it useful.

Either way, keep up the amazing job you’re doing curating the best resources on the internet about [topic of their resource page].

Let me know if there’s anything else I can help you with.

Thanks, [First Name]!

[Your Name]

Offer similar content as a replacement

The mistake most people make with broken link building campaigns is suggesting content that isn’t a good replacement for the dead page. If you do this, most people won’t bother responding to your email outreach, and even if they do respond, they most likely won’t link to you.

Before you begin that broken link campaign, make sure you find out what content was existing on the dead page. If you have something similar, you can send it to them as a replacement. Else, you should consider creating an amazing piece of content from scratch.

That way, you’re adding more value upfront, and stand a better chance of getting more website owners to link to you.

To figure out the exact content to recreate, you can use the Wayback machine.

All you need to do is enter the URL of the 404 page on the search bar in the tool, and click on “Browse History”:

Once you do, it’ll show you exactly what was existing on the dead page previously.

For example, this screenshot below is a 404 page on Drift’s website.

I found the broken link from this article.

To know what was existing on this page, I searched for its previous history using the Wayback machine and this is what I discovered:

As you can see, the post is an in-depth guide on “Demand Generation” covering the following sub-topics:

What is demand generation?

Why is demand generation important?

Who’s responsible for demand generation?

How to do demand generation

Implement strategic demand generation tactics

Demand generation vs. Lead generation

Demand generation metrics: how to measure your efforts

Demand gen benchmarking: how are companies like yours generating demand?

Demand generation tools & technologies

To recreate this page, you'll need to write an in-depth piece of content on demand generation covering these sub-topics and more. That way, the website(s) linking to the broken link will be happy to link to yours instead. This is because you've provided a replacement that’ll add value to their audience.

In contrast, if you reach out to these websites and suggest your service page as a replacement for the broken link, they’d most likely not link to it.

Send follow-up emails

Don’t send one email and call it a day. Rather, you should have a follow-up sequence (think two to four emails) in place to remind the people you’ve reached out to previously about your email, and why a broken link on their page isn’t great for user experience.

Doing this helps you land more links. This is because the person you reached out to has a lot going on in their life, and might have skipped responding to your initial email. By following up with them, you’ll be top of mind, and if your pitch is a good fit, they’ll be more likely to respond to you.

Conclusion

It’s rare to find a website without a broken link. The reason is simple: most website owners and blog managers link to external content from their pages and don’t really monitor the content they linked to months and years ago.

In some cases, these pieces of content no longer exist online because they were created for a short-term purpose, or perhaps are no longer relevant.

This is a goldmine you can tap into as a marketer. By finding these broken link opportunities the right way, you can build relevant links for your website and pages to help you rank higher in the SERPs.

Join the conversation: Tweet your questions and comments about broken link building using #MozBlog!

#túi_giấy_epacking_việt_nam #túi_giấy_epacking #in_túi_giấy_giá_rẻ #in_túi_giấy #epackingvietnam #tuigiayepacking

[bfxenon]

How to Get Results from Broken Link Building

Broken link building is one of those link building tactics that is difficult to execute, as it’s time-consuming and the results can often be disappointing.

If you ask link building experts about their experience with this strategy, their responses will vary. While some say that it’s a waste of time, others insist that it still works for them.

This leads to comments such as these on public forums:

Truth is, a broken link building campaign will be effective and get you great results if you approach it the right way. Otherwise, you’ll just be wasting time and resources.

In this post, I’ll show you the exact process you can use to get results with broken link building, including:

How to find resource pages at scale

How to get broken link building opportunities from resource pages

How to analyze your competitors’ link profiles for broken links

Best practices that help you succeed with broken link building

What is broken link building?

Broken link building is the process of finding broken or dead outbound links on another website, informing the website owners/managers about them, and recommending a similar article you’ve written as a replacement for that broken link.

For instance, in this blog post on Mention about building an email list, I found a link to Neil Patel’s blog:

When I clicked on the link, I was redirected to this 404 page:

As you can see, the page no longer exists, but a reputable publication still links to it.

In this instance, this was a case study that was published on the blog about how their team increased Tech Crunch’s organic traffic by 30% within 60 days.

If you’re a marketing agency and have a similar case study you’ve published recently, you can reach out to websites still linking to this post and offer yours as a replacement. That way, you help them fix an issue on their website and get a backlink in return.

Broken link building is effective because it’s focused on adding value and reciprocity. You’re not just asking the other person to link to you, rather you’re giving them value upfront and even suggesting how they can make the user experience on their website better.

Even if they decide not to link to you, they’ll appreciate the help identifying broken links they may have missed.

Take this email I got recently as an example:

As you can see, they came across a post on my blog about conversational marketing and found a broken link in it. They reached out to inform me about it and suggested one of their articles as a replacement.

If I decide to link to them, it’s a win-win for both parties. From my end, I’m able to fix the broken link, which helps with a better user experience, and they’ve successfully secured a backlink.

How to find broken link opportunities at scale

Your ability to find broken link opportunities at scale will determine whether you’ll succeed with this strategy. The reason is simple: Broken link building is a numbers game. The more opportunities you can find, the higher your chances of getting backlinks in return.

1. Scraping resource pages

A resource page is usually a static page on a website that curates different resources on specific topics with links to the original sources.

Here’s a good example from Learning SEO, where Aleyda Solis curated the top resources and guides about SEO:

As you can see, she’s linking to other relevant articles about keyword research from this section of the resource page.

How exactly do you discover resource pages at scale?

To discover resource pages, you can make use of Google search operators. These help you uncover lots of resource page opportunities faster by extending the capabilities of a regular Google search. For reference, here’s a comprehensive list of 67 Google search operators.

Let’s use the intitle operator as an example. By typing “broken link building intitle:resources” into the search bar, the SERP shows pages that have “resources” in their title and are related to broken link building.

Here’s what that looks like:

How can you find broken link building opportunities from these resource pages?

Let’s assume that you want to explore the broken link opportunities from the Citation Labs broken link building resource page.

All you need to do is open the page and start checking the links one after the other. Once you identify any broken link, you can note it down. Using that strategy definitely works, but it takes time.

Alternatively, you can use chrome extensions such as Check My Links or Link Miner for this process.

With Link Miner, I was able to spot these three opportunities on the page above:

When I clicked on one of those red links shown above, here’s what I found:

If you have a page that’s a match or similar in topic, you can reach out to Citation Labs, inform them about the broken link, and suggest your page as a replacement.

Here’s where it gets more interesting.

If there are other websites linking to that broken link page, you can reach out to them using the same process above. All you need to do is use any of the SEO tools such as Moz, SEMrush, Ahrefs, etc., to identify other websites linking to the page.

When I checked one of the broken links in the resource page on Moz, here’s what I found:

As you can see, there are about 15 other websites linking to this broken link. I’ve now unlocked 15 more opportunities from one broken link alone.

2. Competitor link profile analysis

Using SEO tools, you can easily analyze a competitor’s link profile to identify the broken links they have. Once you do, you can create a similar page, then reach out to all the websites linking to the broken page to notify them about the broken link, and ask them to link to you instead.

This is what the process looks like on Moz: Link research > Top pages > Enter root domain or specific URL > Change status code to “4xx - broken”.

For example, if you’re a prospecting tool, one of your competitors is Ontolo.

Using the process above on Moz, you can easily identify some of the broken links on the website:

As you can see, one of the broken links has more than 100 websites still linking to it. You can identify these links by clicking on “View Links”. Once done, you can use Wayback Machine to find out exactly what the page looked like in the past, and then recreate it.

Using the Wayback machine, I discovered one of the broken links above was a free tool to check duplicate URLs in a list.

So, let’s say this is your niche and you want to take advantage of the links to this dead page. All you need to do is recreate a similar tool, and follow the process outlined above.

Best practices to help you succeed with broken link building

Reach out to the right person

If you contact the wrong person, getting a response will be difficult. For a broken link building campaign, you want to reach out to someone who’s in charge of inbound marketing or manages the content publishing process in a company.

Reaching out to someone in a more senior role such as VP Marketing, Director of Marketing, Head of Content, etc., in a large company almost guarantees that you won’t get a response.

To identify the right person to contact, you can check the company’s About Us or team page on their website. Alternatively, you can check the company’s LinkedIn page.

After identifying the right contact person, you can use email finding tools such as Hunter, Skrapp, Voila Norbert, and so on to find their email address.

When sending a cold email, make sure you comply with the ethical requirements of the CAN-SPAM Act. This means that your cold emails:

Shouldn’t use a misleading subject line

Should have an accurate sender information

Should include your company’s physical address

Should make it easy for recipients to opt-out from receiving your emails

Send a great outreach email

Many outreach emails get marked as spam. So, sending an amazing, personalized outreach email that adds value for the recipient will make you stand out instantly and will put you in a better position to land that broken link.

To make your emails stand, you should:

Use a clear and click worthy subject line.

Address the recipient by their first name.

Mention something unique which you found about them on social media or elsewhere .

Compliment them if possible, but make sure it doesn’t sound generic.

Keep your outreach emails short and straight to the point.

Use the inverted pyramid style of writing. Begin your email with the most important points.

Be explicit about what you want.

Here’s an example email template you can use to acquire broken links from resource pages:

Subject line: Found this broken link on [website name]

Hey [First Name],

Just found out that the link on your website to [Mention website name with 404 page] doesn’t work anymore:

[insert URL of the broken link]

Here’s a screenshot of the page: [Insert link to a screenshot]

Came across this while going through some of the links you mentioned on [topic of their resource page]:

[insert URL of their resources page]

So, I recently created a comprehensive guide on [mention your website] that will be a perfect replacement for the 404 page. [Include additional comment on why your content deserves to make it on their list of resources].

[insert URL to your page]

I believe that your visitors will find it useful.

Either way, keep up the amazing job you’re doing curating the best resources on the internet about [topic of their resource page].

Let me know if there’s anything else I can help you with.

Thanks, [First Name]!

[Your Name]

Offer similar content as a replacement

The mistake most people make with broken link building campaigns is suggesting content that isn’t a good replacement for the dead page. If you do this, most people won’t bother responding to your email outreach, and even if they do respond, they most likely won’t link to you.

Before you begin that broken link campaign, make sure you find out what content was existing on the dead page. If you have something similar, you can send it to them as a replacement. Else, you should consider creating an amazing piece of content from scratch.

That way, you’re adding more value upfront, and stand a better chance of getting more website owners to link to you.

To figure out the exact content to recreate, you can use the Wayback machine.

All you need to do is enter the URL of the 404 page on the search bar in the tool, and click on “Browse History”:

Once you do, it’ll show you exactly what was existing on the dead page previously.

For example, this screenshot below is a 404 page on Drift’s website.

I found the broken link from this article.

To know what was existing on this page, I searched for its previous history using the Wayback machine and this is what I discovered:

As you can see, the post is an in-depth guide on “Demand Generation” covering the following sub-topics:

What is demand generation?

Why is demand generation important?

Who’s responsible for demand generation?

How to do demand generation

Implement strategic demand generation tactics

Demand generation vs. Lead generation

Demand generation metrics: how to measure your efforts

Demand gen benchmarking: how are companies like yours generating demand?

Demand generation tools & technologies

To recreate this page, you'll need to write an in-depth piece of content on demand generation covering these sub-topics and more. That way, the website(s) linking to the broken link will be happy to link to yours instead. This is because you've provided a replacement that’ll add value to their audience.

In contrast, if you reach out to these websites and suggest your service page as a replacement for the broken link, they’d most likely not link to it.

Send follow-up emails

Don’t send one email and call it a day. Rather, you should have a follow-up sequence (think two to four emails) in place to remind the people you’ve reached out to previously about your email, and why a broken link on their page isn’t great for user experience.

Doing this helps you land more links. This is because the person you reached out to has a lot going on in their life, and might have skipped responding to your initial email. By following up with them, you’ll be top of mind, and if your pitch is a good fit, they’ll be more likely to respond to you.

Conclusion

It’s rare to find a website without a broken link. The reason is simple: most website owners and blog managers link to external content from their pages and don’t really monitor the content they linked to months and years ago.

In some cases, these pieces of content no longer exist online because they were created for a short-term purpose, or perhaps are no longer relevant.

This is a goldmine you can tap into as a marketer. By finding these broken link opportunities the right way, you can build relevant links for your website and pages to help you rank higher in the SERPs.

Join the conversation: Tweet your questions and comments about broken link building using #MozBlog!

[nutrifami]

How to Get Results from Broken Link Building

Broken link building is one of those link building tactics that is difficult to execute, as it’s time-consuming and the results can often be disappointing.

If you ask link building experts about their experience with this strategy, their responses will vary. While some say that it’s a waste of time, others insist that it still works for them.

This leads to comments such as these on public forums:

Truth is, a broken link building campaign will be effective and get you great results if you approach it the right way. Otherwise, you’ll just be wasting time and resources.

In this post, I’ll show you the exact process you can use to get results with broken link building, including:

How to find resource pages at scale

How to get broken link building opportunities from resource pages

How to analyze your competitors’ link profiles for broken links

Best practices that help you succeed with broken link building

What is broken link building?

Broken link building is the process of finding broken or dead outbound links on another website, informing the website owners/managers about them, and recommending a similar article you’ve written as a replacement for that broken link.

For instance, in this blog post on Mention about building an email list, I found a link to Neil Patel’s blog:

When I clicked on the link, I was redirected to this 404 page:

As you can see, the page no longer exists, but a reputable publication still links to it.

In this instance, this was a case study that was published on the blog about how their team increased Tech Crunch’s organic traffic by 30% within 60 days.

If you’re a marketing agency and have a similar case study you’ve published recently, you can reach out to websites still linking to this post and offer yours as a replacement. That way, you help them fix an issue on their website and get a backlink in return.

Broken link building is effective because it’s focused on adding value and reciprocity. You’re not just asking the other person to link to you, rather you’re giving them value upfront and even suggesting how they can make the user experience on their website better.

Even if they decide not to link to you, they’ll appreciate the help identifying broken links they may have missed.

Take this email I got recently as an example:

As you can see, they came across a post on my blog about conversational marketing and found a broken link in it. They reached out to inform me about it and suggested one of their articles as a replacement.

If I decide to link to them, it’s a win-win for both parties. From my end, I’m able to fix the broken link, which helps with a better user experience, and they’ve successfully secured a backlink.

How to find broken link opportunities at scale

Your ability to find broken link opportunities at scale will determine whether you’ll succeed with this strategy. The reason is simple: Broken link building is a numbers game. The more opportunities you can find, the higher your chances of getting backlinks in return.

1. Scraping resource pages

A resource page is usually a static page on a website that curates different resources on specific topics with links to the original sources.

Here’s a good example from Learning SEO, where Aleyda Solis curated the top resources and guides about SEO:

As you can see, she’s linking to other relevant articles about keyword research from this section of the resource page.

How exactly do you discover resource pages at scale?

To discover resource pages, you can make use of Google search operators. These help you uncover lots of resource page opportunities faster by extending the capabilities of a regular Google search. For reference, here’s a comprehensive list of 67 Google search operators.

Let’s use the intitle operator as an example. By typing “broken link building intitle:resources” into the search bar, the SERP shows pages that have “resources” in their title and are related to broken link building.

Here’s what that looks like:

How can you find broken link building opportunities from these resource pages?

Let’s assume that you want to explore the broken link opportunities from the Citation Labs broken link building resource page.

All you need to do is open the page and start checking the links one after the other. Once you identify any broken link, you can note it down. Using that strategy definitely works, but it takes time.

Alternatively, you can use chrome extensions such as Check My Links or Link Miner for this process.

With Link Miner, I was able to spot these three opportunities on the page above:

When I clicked on one of those red links shown above, here’s what I found:

If you have a page that’s a match or similar in topic, you can reach out to Citation Labs, inform them about the broken link, and suggest your page as a replacement.

Here’s where it gets more interesting.

If there are other websites linking to that broken link page, you can reach out to them using the same process above. All you need to do is use any of the SEO tools such as Moz, SEMrush, Ahrefs, etc., to identify other websites linking to the page.

When I checked one of the broken links in the resource page on Moz, here’s what I found:

As you can see, there are about 15 other websites linking to this broken link. I’ve now unlocked 15 more opportunities from one broken link alone.

2. Competitor link profile analysis

Using SEO tools, you can easily analyze a competitor’s link profile to identify the broken links they have. Once you do, you can create a similar page, then reach out to all the websites linking to the broken page to notify them about the broken link, and ask them to link to you instead.

This is what the process looks like on Moz: Link research > Top pages > Enter root domain or specific URL > Change status code to “4xx - broken”.

For example, if you’re a prospecting tool, one of your competitors is Ontolo.

Using the process above on Moz, you can easily identify some of the broken links on the website:

As you can see, one of the broken links has more than 100 websites still linking to it. You can identify these links by clicking on “View Links”. Once done, you can use Wayback Machine to find out exactly what the page looked like in the past, and then recreate it.

Using the Wayback machine, I discovered one of the broken links above was a free tool to check duplicate URLs in a list.

So, let’s say this is your niche and you want to take advantage of the links to this dead page. All you need to do is recreate a similar tool, and follow the process outlined above.

Best practices to help you succeed with broken link building

Reach out to the right person

If you contact the wrong person, getting a response will be difficult. For a broken link building campaign, you want to reach out to someone who’s in charge of inbound marketing or manages the content publishing process in a company.

Reaching out to someone in a more senior role such as VP Marketing, Director of Marketing, Head of Content, etc., in a large company almost guarantees that you won’t get a response.

To identify the right person to contact, you can check the company’s About Us or team page on their website. Alternatively, you can check the company’s LinkedIn page.

After identifying the right contact person, you can use email finding tools such as Hunter, Skrapp, Voila Norbert, and so on to find their email address.

When sending a cold email, make sure you comply with the ethical requirements of the CAN-SPAM Act. This means that your cold emails:

Shouldn’t use a misleading subject line

Should have an accurate sender information

Should include your company’s physical address

Should make it easy for recipients to opt-out from receiving your emails

Send a great outreach email

Many outreach emails get marked as spam. So, sending an amazing, personalized outreach email that adds value for the recipient will make you stand out instantly and will put you in a better position to land that broken link.

To make your emails stand, you should:

Use a clear and click worthy subject line.

Address the recipient by their first name.

Mention something unique which you found about them on social media or elsewhere .

Compliment them if possible, but make sure it doesn’t sound generic.

Keep your outreach emails short and straight to the point.

Use the inverted pyramid style of writing. Begin your email with the most important points.

Be explicit about what you want.

Here’s an example email template you can use to acquire broken links from resource pages:

Subject line: Found this broken link on [website name]

Hey [First Name],

Just found out that the link on your website to [Mention website name with 404 page] doesn’t work anymore:

[insert URL of the broken link]

Here’s a screenshot of the page: [Insert link to a screenshot]

Came across this while going through some of the links you mentioned on [topic of their resource page]:

[insert URL of their resources page]

So, I recently created a comprehensive guide on [mention your website] that will be a perfect replacement for the 404 page. [Include additional comment on why your content deserves to make it on their list of resources].

[insert URL to your page]

I believe that your visitors will find it useful.

Either way, keep up the amazing job you’re doing curating the best resources on the internet about [topic of their resource page].

Let me know if there’s anything else I can help you with.

Thanks, [First Name]!

[Your Name]

Offer similar content as a replacement

The mistake most people make with broken link building campaigns is suggesting content that isn’t a good replacement for the dead page. If you do this, most people won’t bother responding to your email outreach, and even if they do respond, they most likely won’t link to you.

Before you begin that broken link campaign, make sure you find out what content was existing on the dead page. If you have something similar, you can send it to them as a replacement. Else, you should consider creating an amazing piece of content from scratch.

That way, you’re adding more value upfront, and stand a better chance of getting more website owners to link to you.

To figure out the exact content to recreate, you can use the Wayback machine.

All you need to do is enter the URL of the 404 page on the search bar in the tool, and click on “Browse History”:

Once you do, it’ll show you exactly what was existing on the dead page previously.

For example, this screenshot below is a 404 page on Drift’s website.

I found the broken link from this article.

To know what was existing on this page, I searched for its previous history using the Wayback machine and this is what I discovered:

As you can see, the post is an in-depth guide on “Demand Generation” covering the following sub-topics:

What is demand generation?

Why is demand generation important?

Who’s responsible for demand generation?

How to do demand generation

Implement strategic demand generation tactics

Demand generation vs. Lead generation

Demand generation metrics: how to measure your efforts

Demand gen benchmarking: how are companies like yours generating demand?

Demand generation tools & technologies

To recreate this page, you'll need to write an in-depth piece of content on demand generation covering these sub-topics and more. That way, the website(s) linking to the broken link will be happy to link to yours instead. This is because you've provided a replacement that’ll add value to their audience.

In contrast, if you reach out to these websites and suggest your service page as a replacement for the broken link, they’d most likely not link to it.

Send follow-up emails

Don’t send one email and call it a day. Rather, you should have a follow-up sequence (think two to four emails) in place to remind the people you’ve reached out to previously about your email, and why a broken link on their page isn’t great for user experience.

Doing this helps you land more links. This is because the person you reached out to has a lot going on in their life, and might have skipped responding to your initial email. By following up with them, you’ll be top of mind, and if your pitch is a good fit, they’ll be more likely to respond to you.

Conclusion

It’s rare to find a website without a broken link. The reason is simple: most website owners and blog managers link to external content from their pages and don’t really monitor the content they linked to months and years ago.

In some cases, these pieces of content no longer exist online because they were created for a short-term purpose, or perhaps are no longer relevant.

This is a goldmine you can tap into as a marketer. By finding these broken link opportunities the right way, you can build relevant links for your website and pages to help you rank higher in the SERPs.

Join the conversation: Tweet your questions and comments about broken link building using #MozBlog!

[xaydungtruonggia]

How to Get Results from Broken Link Building

Broken link building is one of those link building tactics that is difficult to execute, as it’s time-consuming and the results can often be disappointing.

If you ask link building experts about their experience with this strategy, their responses will vary. While some say that it’s a waste of time, others insist that it still works for them.

This leads to comments such as these on public forums:

Truth is, a broken link building campaign will be effective and get you great results if you approach it the right way. Otherwise, you’ll just be wasting time and resources.

In this post, I’ll show you the exact process you can use to get results with broken link building, including:

How to find resource pages at scale

How to get broken link building opportunities from resource pages

How to analyze your competitors’ link profiles for broken links

Best practices that help you succeed with broken link building

What is broken link building?

Broken link building is the process of finding broken or dead outbound links on another website, informing the website owners/managers about them, and recommending a similar article you’ve written as a replacement for that broken link.

For instance, in this blog post on Mention about building an email list, I found a link to Neil Patel’s blog:

When I clicked on the link, I was redirected to this 404 page:

As you can see, the page no longer exists, but a reputable publication still links to it.

In this instance, this was a case study that was published on the blog about how their team increased Tech Crunch’s organic traffic by 30% within 60 days.

If you’re a marketing agency and have a similar case study you’ve published recently, you can reach out to websites still linking to this post and offer yours as a replacement. That way, you help them fix an issue on their website and get a backlink in return.

Broken link building is effective because it’s focused on adding value and reciprocity. You’re not just asking the other person to link to you, rather you’re giving them value upfront and even suggesting how they can make the user experience on their website better.

Even if they decide not to link to you, they’ll appreciate the help identifying broken links they may have missed.

Take this email I got recently as an example:

As you can see, they came across a post on my blog about conversational marketing and found a broken link in it. They reached out to inform me about it and suggested one of their articles as a replacement.

If I decide to link to them, it’s a win-win for both parties. From my end, I’m able to fix the broken link, which helps with a better user experience, and they’ve successfully secured a backlink.

How to find broken link opportunities at scale

Your ability to find broken link opportunities at scale will determine whether you’ll succeed with this strategy. The reason is simple: Broken link building is a numbers game. The more opportunities you can find, the higher your chances of getting backlinks in return.

1. Scraping resource pages

A resource page is usually a static page on a website that curates different resources on specific topics with links to the original sources.

Here’s a good example from Learning SEO, where Aleyda Solis curated the top resources and guides about SEO:

As you can see, she’s linking to other relevant articles about keyword research from this section of the resource page.

How exactly do you discover resource pages at scale?

To discover resource pages, you can make use of Google search operators. These help you uncover lots of resource page opportunities faster by extending the capabilities of a regular Google search. For reference, here’s a comprehensive list of 67 Google search operators.

Let’s use the intitle operator as an example. By typing “broken link building intitle:resources” into the search bar, the SERP shows pages that have “resources” in their title and are related to broken link building.

Here’s what that looks like:

How can you find broken link building opportunities from these resource pages?

Let’s assume that you want to explore the broken link opportunities from the Citation Labs broken link building resource page.

All you need to do is open the page and start checking the links one after the other. Once you identify any broken link, you can note it down. Using that strategy definitely works, but it takes time.

Alternatively, you can use chrome extensions such as Check My Links or Link Miner for this process.

With Link Miner, I was able to spot these three opportunities on the page above:

When I clicked on one of those red links shown above, here’s what I found:

If you have a page that’s a match or similar in topic, you can reach out to Citation Labs, inform them about the broken link, and suggest your page as a replacement.

Here’s where it gets more interesting.

If there are other websites linking to that broken link page, you can reach out to them using the same process above. All you need to do is use any of the SEO tools such as Moz, SEMrush, Ahrefs, etc., to identify other websites linking to the page.

When I checked one of the broken links in the resource page on Moz, here’s what I found:

As you can see, there are about 15 other websites linking to this broken link. I’ve now unlocked 15 more opportunities from one broken link alone.

2. Competitor link profile analysis

Using SEO tools, you can easily analyze a competitor’s link profile to identify the broken links they have. Once you do, you can create a similar page, then reach out to all the websites linking to the broken page to notify them about the broken link, and ask them to link to you instead.

This is what the process looks like on Moz: Link research > Top pages > Enter root domain or specific URL > Change status code to “4xx - broken”.

For example, if you’re a prospecting tool, one of your competitors is Ontolo.

Using the process above on Moz, you can easily identify some of the broken links on the website:

As you can see, one of the broken links has more than 100 websites still linking to it. You can identify these links by clicking on “View Links”. Once done, you can use Wayback Machine to find out exactly what the page looked like in the past, and then recreate it.

Using the Wayback machine, I discovered one of the broken links above was a free tool to check duplicate URLs in a list.

So, let’s say this is your niche and you want to take advantage of the links to this dead page. All you need to do is recreate a similar tool, and follow the process outlined above.

Best practices to help you succeed with broken link building

Reach out to the right person

If you contact the wrong person, getting a response will be difficult. For a broken link building campaign, you want to reach out to someone who’s in charge of inbound marketing or manages the content publishing process in a company.

Reaching out to someone in a more senior role such as VP Marketing, Director of Marketing, Head of Content, etc., in a large company almost guarantees that you won’t get a response.

To identify the right person to contact, you can check the company’s About Us or team page on their website. Alternatively, you can check the company’s LinkedIn page.

After identifying the right contact person, you can use email finding tools such as Hunter, Skrapp, Voila Norbert, and so on to find their email address.

When sending a cold email, make sure you comply with the ethical requirements of the CAN-SPAM Act. This means that your cold emails:

Shouldn’t use a misleading subject line

Should have an accurate sender information

Should include your company’s physical address

Should make it easy for recipients to opt-out from receiving your emails

Send a great outreach email

Many outreach emails get marked as spam. So, sending an amazing, personalized outreach email that adds value for the recipient will make you stand out instantly and will put you in a better position to land that broken link.

To make your emails stand, you should:

Use a clear and click worthy subject line.

Address the recipient by their first name.

Mention something unique which you found about them on social media or elsewhere .

Compliment them if possible, but make sure it doesn’t sound generic.

Keep your outreach emails short and straight to the point.

Use the inverted pyramid style of writing. Begin your email with the most important points.

Be explicit about what you want.

Here’s an example email template you can use to acquire broken links from resource pages:

Subject line: Found this broken link on [website name]

Hey [First Name],

Just found out that the link on your website to [Mention website name with 404 page] doesn’t work anymore:

[insert URL of the broken link]

Here’s a screenshot of the page: [Insert link to a screenshot]

Came across this while going through some of the links you mentioned on [topic of their resource page]:

[insert URL of their resources page]

So, I recently created a comprehensive guide on [mention your website] that will be a perfect replacement for the 404 page. [Include additional comment on why your content deserves to make it on their list of resources].

[insert URL to your page]

I believe that your visitors will find it useful.

Either way, keep up the amazing job you’re doing curating the best resources on the internet about [topic of their resource page].

Let me know if there’s anything else I can help you with.

Thanks, [First Name]!

[Your Name]

Offer similar content as a replacement

The mistake most people make with broken link building campaigns is suggesting content that isn’t a good replacement for the dead page. If you do this, most people won’t bother responding to your email outreach, and even if they do respond, they most likely won’t link to you.

Before you begin that broken link campaign, make sure you find out what content was existing on the dead page. If you have something similar, you can send it to them as a replacement. Else, you should consider creating an amazing piece of content from scratch.

That way, you’re adding more value upfront, and stand a better chance of getting more website owners to link to you.

To figure out the exact content to recreate, you can use the Wayback machine.

All you need to do is enter the URL of the 404 page on the search bar in the tool, and click on “Browse History”:

Once you do, it’ll show you exactly what was existing on the dead page previously.

For example, this screenshot below is a 404 page on Drift’s website.

I found the broken link from this article.

To know what was existing on this page, I searched for its previous history using the Wayback machine and this is what I discovered:

As you can see, the post is an in-depth guide on “Demand Generation” covering the following sub-topics:

What is demand generation?

Why is demand generation important?

Who’s responsible for demand generation?

How to do demand generation

Implement strategic demand generation tactics

Demand generation vs. Lead generation

Demand generation metrics: how to measure your efforts

Demand gen benchmarking: how are companies like yours generating demand?

Demand generation tools & technologies

To recreate this page, you'll need to write an in-depth piece of content on demand generation covering these sub-topics and more. That way, the website(s) linking to the broken link will be happy to link to yours instead. This is because you've provided a replacement that’ll add value to their audience.

In contrast, if you reach out to these websites and suggest your service page as a replacement for the broken link, they’d most likely not link to it.

Send follow-up emails

Don’t send one email and call it a day. Rather, you should have a follow-up sequence (think two to four emails) in place to remind the people you’ve reached out to previously about your email, and why a broken link on their page isn’t great for user experience.

Doing this helps you land more links. This is because the person you reached out to has a lot going on in their life, and might have skipped responding to your initial email. By following up with them, you’ll be top of mind, and if your pitch is a good fit, they’ll be more likely to respond to you.

Conclusion

It’s rare to find a website without a broken link. The reason is simple: most website owners and blog managers link to external content from their pages and don’t really monitor the content they linked to months and years ago.

In some cases, these pieces of content no longer exist online because they were created for a short-term purpose, or perhaps are no longer relevant.

This is a goldmine you can tap into as a marketer. By finding these broken link opportunities the right way, you can build relevant links for your website and pages to help you rank higher in the SERPs.

Join the conversation: Tweet your questions and comments about broken link building using #MozBlog!

[camerasieunhovn]

How to Get Results from Broken Link Building

Broken link building is one of those link building tactics that is difficult to execute, as it’s time-consuming and the results can often be disappointing.

If you ask link building experts about their experience with this strategy, their responses will vary. While some say that it’s a waste of time, others insist that it still works for them.

This leads to comments such as these on public forums:

Truth is, a broken link building campaign will be effective and get you great results if you approach it the right way. Otherwise, you’ll just be wasting time and resources.

In this post, I’ll show you the exact process you can use to get results with broken link building, including:

How to find resource pages at scale

How to get broken link building opportunities from resource pages

How to analyze your competitors’ link profiles for broken links

Best practices that help you succeed with broken link building

What is broken link building?

Broken link building is the process of finding broken or dead outbound links on another website, informing the website owners/managers about them, and recommending a similar article you’ve written as a replacement for that broken link.

For instance, in this blog post on Mention about building an email list, I found a link to Neil Patel’s blog:

When I clicked on the link, I was redirected to this 404 page:

As you can see, the page no longer exists, but a reputable publication still links to it.

In this instance, this was a case study that was published on the blog about how their team increased Tech Crunch’s organic traffic by 30% within 60 days.

If you’re a marketing agency and have a similar case study you’ve published recently, you can reach out to websites still linking to this post and offer yours as a replacement. That way, you help them fix an issue on their website and get a backlink in return.

Broken link building is effective because it’s focused on adding value and reciprocity. You’re not just asking the other person to link to you, rather you’re giving them value upfront and even suggesting how they can make the user experience on their website better.

Even if they decide not to link to you, they’ll appreciate the help identifying broken links they may have missed.

Take this email I got recently as an example:

As you can see, they came across a post on my blog about conversational marketing and found a broken link in it. They reached out to inform me about it and suggested one of their articles as a replacement.

If I decide to link to them, it’s a win-win for both parties. From my end, I’m able to fix the broken link, which helps with a better user experience, and they’ve successfully secured a backlink.

How to find broken link opportunities at scale

Your ability to find broken link opportunities at scale will determine whether you’ll succeed with this strategy. The reason is simple: Broken link building is a numbers game. The more opportunities you can find, the higher your chances of getting backlinks in return.

1. Scraping resource pages

A resource page is usually a static page on a website that curates different resources on specific topics with links to the original sources.

Here’s a good example from Learning SEO, where Aleyda Solis curated the top resources and guides about SEO:

As you can see, she’s linking to other relevant articles about keyword research from this section of the resource page.

How exactly do you discover resource pages at scale?

To discover resource pages, you can make use of Google search operators. These help you uncover lots of resource page opportunities faster by extending the capabilities of a regular Google search. For reference, here’s a comprehensive list of 67 Google search operators.

Let’s use the intitle operator as an example. By typing “broken link building intitle:resources” into the search bar, the SERP shows pages that have “resources” in their title and are related to broken link building.

Here’s what that looks like:

How can you find broken link building opportunities from these resource pages?

Let’s assume that you want to explore the broken link opportunities from the Citation Labs broken link building resource page.

All you need to do is open the page and start checking the links one after the other. Once you identify any broken link, you can note it down. Using that strategy definitely works, but it takes time.

Alternatively, you can use chrome extensions such as Check My Links or Link Miner for this process.

With Link Miner, I was able to spot these three opportunities on the page above:

When I clicked on one of those red links shown above, here’s what I found:

If you have a page that’s a match or similar in topic, you can reach out to Citation Labs, inform them about the broken link, and suggest your page as a replacement.

Here’s where it gets more interesting.

If there are other websites linking to that broken link page, you can reach out to them using the same process above. All you need to do is use any of the SEO tools such as Moz, SEMrush, Ahrefs, etc., to identify other websites linking to the page.

When I checked one of the broken links in the resource page on Moz, here’s what I found:

As you can see, there are about 15 other websites linking to this broken link. I’ve now unlocked 15 more opportunities from one broken link alone.

2. Competitor link profile analysis

Using SEO tools, you can easily analyze a competitor’s link profile to identify the broken links they have. Once you do, you can create a similar page, then reach out to all the websites linking to the broken page to notify them about the broken link, and ask them to link to you instead.

This is what the process looks like on Moz: Link research > Top pages > Enter root domain or specific URL > Change status code to “4xx - broken”.

For example, if you’re a prospecting tool, one of your competitors is Ontolo.

Using the process above on Moz, you can easily identify some of the broken links on the website:

As you can see, one of the broken links has more than 100 websites still linking to it. You can identify these links by clicking on “View Links”. Once done, you can use Wayback Machine to find out exactly what the page looked like in the past, and then recreate it.

Using the Wayback machine, I discovered one of the broken links above was a free tool to check duplicate URLs in a list.

So, let’s say this is your niche and you want to take advantage of the links to this dead page. All you need to do is recreate a similar tool, and follow the process outlined above.

Best practices to help you succeed with broken link building

Reach out to the right person

If you contact the wrong person, getting a response will be difficult. For a broken link building campaign, you want to reach out to someone who’s in charge of inbound marketing or manages the content publishing process in a company.

Reaching out to someone in a more senior role such as VP Marketing, Director of Marketing, Head of Content, etc., in a large company almost guarantees that you won’t get a response.

To identify the right person to contact, you can check the company’s About Us or team page on their website. Alternatively, you can check the company’s LinkedIn page.

After identifying the right contact person, you can use email finding tools such as Hunter, Skrapp, Voila Norbert, and so on to find their email address.

When sending a cold email, make sure you comply with the ethical requirements of the CAN-SPAM Act. This means that your cold emails:

Shouldn’t use a misleading subject line

Should have an accurate sender information

Should include your company’s physical address

Should make it easy for recipients to opt-out from receiving your emails

Send a great outreach email

Many outreach emails get marked as spam. So, sending an amazing, personalized outreach email that adds value for the recipient will make you stand out instantly and will put you in a better position to land that broken link.

To make your emails stand, you should:

Use a clear and click worthy subject line.

Address the recipient by their first name.

Mention something unique which you found about them on social media or elsewhere .

Compliment them if possible, but make sure it doesn’t sound generic.

Keep your outreach emails short and straight to the point.

Use the inverted pyramid style of writing. Begin your email with the most important points.

Be explicit about what you want.

Here’s an example email template you can use to acquire broken links from resource pages:

Subject line: Found this broken link on [website name]

Hey [First Name],

Just found out that the link on your website to [Mention website name with 404 page] doesn’t work anymore:

[insert URL of the broken link]

Here’s a screenshot of the page: [Insert link to a screenshot]

Came across this while going through some of the links you mentioned on [topic of their resource page]:

[insert URL of their resources page]

So, I recently created a comprehensive guide on [mention your website] that will be a perfect replacement for the 404 page. [Include additional comment on why your content deserves to make it on their list of resources].

[insert URL to your page]

I believe that your visitors will find it useful.

Either way, keep up the amazing job you’re doing curating the best resources on the internet about [topic of their resource page].

Let me know if there’s anything else I can help you with.

Thanks, [First Name]!

[Your Name]

Offer similar content as a replacement

The mistake most people make with broken link building campaigns is suggesting content that isn’t a good replacement for the dead page. If you do this, most people won’t bother responding to your email outreach, and even if they do respond, they most likely won’t link to you.

Before you begin that broken link campaign, make sure you find out what content was existing on the dead page. If you have something similar, you can send it to them as a replacement. Else, you should consider creating an amazing piece of content from scratch.

That way, you’re adding more value upfront, and stand a better chance of getting more website owners to link to you.

To figure out the exact content to recreate, you can use the Wayback machine.

All you need to do is enter the URL of the 404 page on the search bar in the tool, and click on “Browse History”:

Once you do, it’ll show you exactly what was existing on the dead page previously.

For example, this screenshot below is a 404 page on Drift’s website.

I found the broken link from this article.

To know what was existing on this page, I searched for its previous history using the Wayback machine and this is what I discovered:

As you can see, the post is an in-depth guide on “Demand Generation” covering the following sub-topics:

What is demand generation?

Why is demand generation important?

Who’s responsible for demand generation?

How to do demand generation

Implement strategic demand generation tactics

Demand generation vs. Lead generation

Demand generation metrics: how to measure your efforts

Demand gen benchmarking: how are companies like yours generating demand?

Demand generation tools & technologies

To recreate this page, you'll need to write an in-depth piece of content on demand generation covering these sub-topics and more. That way, the website(s) linking to the broken link will be happy to link to yours instead. This is because you've provided a replacement that’ll add value to their audience.

In contrast, if you reach out to these websites and suggest your service page as a replacement for the broken link, they’d most likely not link to it.

Send follow-up emails

Don’t send one email and call it a day. Rather, you should have a follow-up sequence (think two to four emails) in place to remind the people you’ve reached out to previously about your email, and why a broken link on their page isn’t great for user experience.

Doing this helps you land more links. This is because the person you reached out to has a lot going on in their life, and might have skipped responding to your initial email. By following up with them, you’ll be top of mind, and if your pitch is a good fit, they’ll be more likely to respond to you.

Conclusion

It’s rare to find a website without a broken link. The reason is simple: most website owners and blog managers link to external content from their pages and don’t really monitor the content they linked to months and years ago.

In some cases, these pieces of content no longer exist online because they were created for a short-term purpose, or perhaps are no longer relevant.

This is a goldmine you can tap into as a marketer. By finding these broken link opportunities the right way, you can build relevant links for your website and pages to help you rank higher in the SERPs.

Join the conversation: Tweet your questions and comments about broken link building using #MozBlog!

[ductrungnguyen87]

How to Get Results from Broken Link Building

Broken link building is one of those link building tactics that is difficult to execute, as it’s time-consuming and the results can often be disappointing.

If you ask link building experts about their experience with this strategy, their responses will vary. While some say that it’s a waste of time, others insist that it still works for them.

This leads to comments such as these on public forums:

Truth is, a broken link building campaign will be effective and get you great results if you approach it the right way. Otherwise, you’ll just be wasting time and resources.

In this post, I’ll show you the exact process you can use to get results with broken link building, including:

How to find resource pages at scale

How to get broken link building opportunities from resource pages

How to analyze your competitors’ link profiles for broken links

Best practices that help you succeed with broken link building

What is broken link building?

Broken link building is the process of finding broken or dead outbound links on another website, informing the website owners/managers about them, and recommending a similar article you’ve written as a replacement for that broken link.

For instance, in this blog post on Mention about building an email list, I found a link to Neil Patel’s blog:

When I clicked on the link, I was redirected to this 404 page:

As you can see, the page no longer exists, but a reputable publication still links to it.

In this instance, this was a case study that was published on the blog about how their team increased Tech Crunch’s organic traffic by 30% within 60 days.

If you’re a marketing agency and have a similar case study you’ve published recently, you can reach out to websites still linking to this post and offer yours as a replacement. That way, you help them fix an issue on their website and get a backlink in return.

Broken link building is effective because it’s focused on adding value and reciprocity. You’re not just asking the other person to link to you, rather you’re giving them value upfront and even suggesting how they can make the user experience on their website better.

Even if they decide not to link to you, they’ll appreciate the help identifying broken links they may have missed.

Take this email I got recently as an example:

As you can see, they came across a post on my blog about conversational marketing and found a broken link in it. They reached out to inform me about it and suggested one of their articles as a replacement.

If I decide to link to them, it’s a win-win for both parties. From my end, I’m able to fix the broken link, which helps with a better user experience, and they’ve successfully secured a backlink.

How to find broken link opportunities at scale

Your ability to find broken link opportunities at scale will determine whether you’ll succeed with this strategy. The reason is simple: Broken link building is a numbers game. The more opportunities you can find, the higher your chances of getting backlinks in return.

1. Scraping resource pages

A resource page is usually a static page on a website that curates different resources on specific topics with links to the original sources.

Here’s a good example from Learning SEO, where Aleyda Solis curated the top resources and guides about SEO:

As you can see, she’s linking to other relevant articles about keyword research from this section of the resource page.

How exactly do you discover resource pages at scale?

To discover resource pages, you can make use of Google search operators. These help you uncover lots of resource page opportunities faster by extending the capabilities of a regular Google search. For reference, here’s a comprehensive list of 67 Google search operators.

Let’s use the intitle operator as an example. By typing “broken link building intitle:resources” into the search bar, the SERP shows pages that have “resources” in their title and are related to broken link building.

Here’s what that looks like:

How can you find broken link building opportunities from these resource pages?

Let’s assume that you want to explore the broken link opportunities from the Citation Labs broken link building resource page.

All you need to do is open the page and start checking the links one after the other. Once you identify any broken link, you can note it down. Using that strategy definitely works, but it takes time.

Alternatively, you can use chrome extensions such as Check My Links or Link Miner for this process.

With Link Miner, I was able to spot these three opportunities on the page above:

When I clicked on one of those red links shown above, here’s what I found:

If you have a page that’s a match or similar in topic, you can reach out to Citation Labs, inform them about the broken link, and suggest your page as a replacement.

Here’s where it gets more interesting.

If there are other websites linking to that broken link page, you can reach out to them using the same process above. All you need to do is use any of the SEO tools such as Moz, SEMrush, Ahrefs, etc., to identify other websites linking to the page.

When I checked one of the broken links in the resource page on Moz, here’s what I found:

As you can see, there are about 15 other websites linking to this broken link. I’ve now unlocked 15 more opportunities from one broken link alone.

2. Competitor link profile analysis

Using SEO tools, you can easily analyze a competitor’s link profile to identify the broken links they have. Once you do, you can create a similar page, then reach out to all the websites linking to the broken page to notify them about the broken link, and ask them to link to you instead.

This is what the process looks like on Moz: Link research > Top pages > Enter root domain or specific URL > Change status code to “4xx - broken”.

For example, if you’re a prospecting tool, one of your competitors is Ontolo.

Using the process above on Moz, you can easily identify some of the broken links on the website:

As you can see, one of the broken links has more than 100 websites still linking to it. You can identify these links by clicking on “View Links”. Once done, you can use Wayback Machine to find out exactly what the page looked like in the past, and then recreate it.

Using the Wayback machine, I discovered one of the broken links above was a free tool to check duplicate URLs in a list.

So, let’s say this is your niche and you want to take advantage of the links to this dead page. All you need to do is recreate a similar tool, and follow the process outlined above.

Best practices to help you succeed with broken link building

Reach out to the right person

If you contact the wrong person, getting a response will be difficult. For a broken link building campaign, you want to reach out to someone who’s in charge of inbound marketing or manages the content publishing process in a company.

Reaching out to someone in a more senior role such as VP Marketing, Director of Marketing, Head of Content, etc., in a large company almost guarantees that you won’t get a response.

To identify the right person to contact, you can check the company’s About Us or team page on their website. Alternatively, you can check the company’s LinkedIn page.

After identifying the right contact person, you can use email finding tools such as Hunter, Skrapp, Voila Norbert, and so on to find their email address.

When sending a cold email, make sure you comply with the ethical requirements of the CAN-SPAM Act. This means that your cold emails:

Shouldn’t use a misleading subject line

Should have an accurate sender information

Should include your company’s physical address

Should make it easy for recipients to opt-out from receiving your emails

Send a great outreach email

Many outreach emails get marked as spam. So, sending an amazing, personalized outreach email that adds value for the recipient will make you stand out instantly and will put you in a better position to land that broken link.

To make your emails stand, you should:

Use a clear and click worthy subject line.

Address the recipient by their first name.

Mention something unique which you found about them on social media or elsewhere .

Compliment them if possible, but make sure it doesn’t sound generic.

Keep your outreach emails short and straight to the point.

Use the inverted pyramid style of writing. Begin your email with the most important points.

Be explicit about what you want.

Here’s an example email template you can use to acquire broken links from resource pages:

Subject line: Found this broken link on [website name]

Hey [First Name],

Just found out that the link on your website to [Mention website name with 404 page] doesn’t work anymore:

[insert URL of the broken link]

Here’s a screenshot of the page: [Insert link to a screenshot]

Came across this while going through some of the links you mentioned on [topic of their resource page]:

[insert URL of their resources page]

So, I recently created a comprehensive guide on [mention your website] that will be a perfect replacement for the 404 page. [Include additional comment on why your content deserves to make it on their list of resources].

[insert URL to your page]

I believe that your visitors will find it useful.

Either way, keep up the amazing job you’re doing curating the best resources on the internet about [topic of their resource page].

Let me know if there’s anything else I can help you with.

Thanks, [First Name]!

[Your Name]

Offer similar content as a replacement

The mistake most people make with broken link building campaigns is suggesting content that isn’t a good replacement for the dead page. If you do this, most people won’t bother responding to your email outreach, and even if they do respond, they most likely won’t link to you.

Before you begin that broken link campaign, make sure you find out what content was existing on the dead page. If you have something similar, you can send it to them as a replacement. Else, you should consider creating an amazing piece of content from scratch.

That way, you’re adding more value upfront, and stand a better chance of getting more website owners to link to you.

To figure out the exact content to recreate, you can use the Wayback machine.

All you need to do is enter the URL of the 404 page on the search bar in the tool, and click on “Browse History”:

Once you do, it’ll show you exactly what was existing on the dead page previously.

For example, this screenshot below is a 404 page on Drift’s website.

I found the broken link from this article.

To know what was existing on this page, I searched for its previous history using the Wayback machine and this is what I discovered:

As you can see, the post is an in-depth guide on “Demand Generation” covering the following sub-topics:

What is demand generation?

Why is demand generation important?

Who’s responsible for demand generation?

How to do demand generation

Implement strategic demand generation tactics

Demand generation vs. Lead generation

Demand generation metrics: how to measure your efforts

Demand gen benchmarking: how are companies like yours generating demand?

Demand generation tools & technologies

To recreate this page, you'll need to write an in-depth piece of content on demand generation covering these sub-topics and more. That way, the website(s) linking to the broken link will be happy to link to yours instead. This is because you've provided a replacement that’ll add value to their audience.

In contrast, if you reach out to these websites and suggest your service page as a replacement for the broken link, they’d most likely not link to it.

Send follow-up emails

Don’t send one email and call it a day. Rather, you should have a follow-up sequence (think two to four emails) in place to remind the people you’ve reached out to previously about your email, and why a broken link on their page isn’t great for user experience.

Doing this helps you land more links. This is because the person you reached out to has a lot going on in their life, and might have skipped responding to your initial email. By following up with them, you’ll be top of mind, and if your pitch is a good fit, they’ll be more likely to respond to you.

Conclusion

It’s rare to find a website without a broken link. The reason is simple: most website owners and blog managers link to external content from their pages and don’t really monitor the content they linked to months and years ago.

In some cases, these pieces of content no longer exist online because they were created for a short-term purpose, or perhaps are no longer relevant.

This is a goldmine you can tap into as a marketer. By finding these broken link opportunities the right way, you can build relevant links for your website and pages to help you rank higher in the SERPs.

Join the conversation: Tweet your questions and comments about broken link building using #MozBlog!

[gamebazu]

How to Get Results from Broken Link Building

Broken link building is one of those link building tactics that is difficult to execute, as it’s time-consuming and the results can often be disappointing.

If you ask link building experts about their experience with this strategy, their responses will vary. While some say that it’s a waste of time, others insist that it still works for them.

This leads to comments such as these on public forums:

Truth is, a broken link building campaign will be effective and get you great results if you approach it the right way. Otherwise, you’ll just be wasting time and resources.

In this post, I’ll show you the exact process you can use to get results with broken link building, including:

How to find resource pages at scale

How to get broken link building opportunities from resource pages

How to analyze your competitors’ link profiles for broken links

Best practices that help you succeed with broken link building

What is broken link building?

Broken link building is the process of finding broken or dead outbound links on another website, informing the website owners/managers about them, and recommending a similar article you’ve written as a replacement for that broken link.

For instance, in this blog post on Mention about building an email list, I found a link to Neil Patel’s blog:

When I clicked on the link, I was redirected to this 404 page:

As you can see, the page no longer exists, but a reputable publication still links to it.

In this instance, this was a case study that was published on the blog about how their team increased Tech Crunch’s organic traffic by 30% within 60 days.

If you’re a marketing agency and have a similar case study you’ve published recently, you can reach out to websites still linking to this post and offer yours as a replacement. That way, you help them fix an issue on their website and get a backlink in return.

Broken link building is effective because it’s focused on adding value and reciprocity. You’re not just asking the other person to link to you, rather you’re giving them value upfront and even suggesting how they can make the user experience on their website better.

Even if they decide not to link to you, they’ll appreciate the help identifying broken links they may have missed.

Take this email I got recently as an example:

As you can see, they came across a post on my blog about conversational marketing and found a broken link in it. They reached out to inform me about it and suggested one of their articles as a replacement.

If I decide to link to them, it’s a win-win for both parties. From my end, I’m able to fix the broken link, which helps with a better user experience, and they’ve successfully secured a backlink.

How to find broken link opportunities at scale

Your ability to find broken link opportunities at scale will determine whether you’ll succeed with this strategy. The reason is simple: Broken link building is a numbers game. The more opportunities you can find, the higher your chances of getting backlinks in return.

1. Scraping resource pages

A resource page is usually a static page on a website that curates different resources on specific topics with links to the original sources.

Here’s a good example from Learning SEO, where Aleyda Solis curated the top resources and guides about SEO:

As you can see, she’s linking to other relevant articles about keyword research from this section of the resource page.

How exactly do you discover resource pages at scale?

To discover resource pages, you can make use of Google search operators. These help you uncover lots of resource page opportunities faster by extending the capabilities of a regular Google search. For reference, here’s a comprehensive list of 67 Google search operators.

Let’s use the intitle operator as an example. By typing “broken link building intitle:resources” into the search bar, the SERP shows pages that have “resources” in their title and are related to broken link building.

Here’s what that looks like:

How can you find broken link building opportunities from these resource pages?

Let’s assume that you want to explore the broken link opportunities from the Citation Labs broken link building resource page.

All you need to do is open the page and start checking the links one after the other. Once you identify any broken link, you can note it down. Using that strategy definitely works, but it takes time.

Alternatively, you can use chrome extensions such as Check My Links or Link Miner for this process.

With Link Miner, I was able to spot these three opportunities on the page above:

When I clicked on one of those red links shown above, here’s what I found:

If you have a page that’s a match or similar in topic, you can reach out to Citation Labs, inform them about the broken link, and suggest your page as a replacement.

Here’s where it gets more interesting.

If there are other websites linking to that broken link page, you can reach out to them using the same process above. All you need to do is use any of the SEO tools such as Moz, SEMrush, Ahrefs, etc., to identify other websites linking to the page.

When I checked one of the broken links in the resource page on Moz, here’s what I found:

As you can see, there are about 15 other websites linking to this broken link. I’ve now unlocked 15 more opportunities from one broken link alone.

2. Competitor link profile analysis

Using SEO tools, you can easily analyze a competitor’s link profile to identify the broken links they have. Once you do, you can create a similar page, then reach out to all the websites linking to the broken page to notify them about the broken link, and ask them to link to you instead.

This is what the process looks like on Moz: Link research > Top pages > Enter root domain or specific URL > Change status code to “4xx - broken”.

For example, if you’re a prospecting tool, one of your competitors is Ontolo.

Using the process above on Moz, you can easily identify some of the broken links on the website:

As you can see, one of the broken links has more than 100 websites still linking to it. You can identify these links by clicking on “View Links”. Once done, you can use Wayback Machine to find out exactly what the page looked like in the past, and then recreate it.

Using the Wayback machine, I discovered one of the broken links above was a free tool to check duplicate URLs in a list.

So, let’s say this is your niche and you want to take advantage of the links to this dead page. All you need to do is recreate a similar tool, and follow the process outlined above.

Best practices to help you succeed with broken link building

Reach out to the right person

If you contact the wrong person, getting a response will be difficult. For a broken link building campaign, you want to reach out to someone who’s in charge of inbound marketing or manages the content publishing process in a company.

Reaching out to someone in a more senior role such as VP Marketing, Director of Marketing, Head of Content, etc., in a large company almost guarantees that you won’t get a response.

To identify the right person to contact, you can check the company’s About Us or team page on their website. Alternatively, you can check the company’s LinkedIn page.

After identifying the right contact person, you can use email finding tools such as Hunter, Skrapp, Voila Norbert, and so on to find their email address.

When sending a cold email, make sure you comply with the ethical requirements of the CAN-SPAM Act. This means that your cold emails:

Shouldn’t use a misleading subject line

Should have an accurate sender information

Should include your company’s physical address

Should make it easy for recipients to opt-out from receiving your emails

Send a great outreach email

Many outreach emails get marked as spam. So, sending an amazing, personalized outreach email that adds value for the recipient will make you stand out instantly and will put you in a better position to land that broken link.

To make your emails stand, you should:

Use a clear and click worthy subject line.

Address the recipient by their first name.

Mention something unique which you found about them on social media or elsewhere .

Compliment them if possible, but make sure it doesn’t sound generic.

Keep your outreach emails short and straight to the point.

Use the inverted pyramid style of writing. Begin your email with the most important points.

Be explicit about what you want.

Here’s an example email template you can use to acquire broken links from resource pages:

Subject line: Found this broken link on [website name]

Hey [First Name],

Just found out that the link on your website to [Mention website name with 404 page] doesn’t work anymore:

[insert URL of the broken link]

Here’s a screenshot of the page: [Insert link to a screenshot]

Came across this while going through some of the links you mentioned on [topic of their resource page]:

[insert URL of their resources page]

So, I recently created a comprehensive guide on [mention your website] that will be a perfect replacement for the 404 page. [Include additional comment on why your content deserves to make it on their list of resources].

[insert URL to your page]

I believe that your visitors will find it useful.

Either way, keep up the amazing job you’re doing curating the best resources on the internet about [topic of their resource page].

Let me know if there’s anything else I can help you with.

Thanks, [First Name]!

[Your Name]

Offer similar content as a replacement

The mistake most people make with broken link building campaigns is suggesting content that isn’t a good replacement for the dead page. If you do this, most people won’t bother responding to your email outreach, and even if they do respond, they most likely won’t link to you.

Before you begin that broken link campaign, make sure you find out what content was existing on the dead page. If you have something similar, you can send it to them as a replacement. Else, you should consider creating an amazing piece of content from scratch.

That way, you’re adding more value upfront, and stand a better chance of getting more website owners to link to you.

To figure out the exact content to recreate, you can use the Wayback machine.

All you need to do is enter the URL of the 404 page on the search bar in the tool, and click on “Browse History”:

Once you do, it’ll show you exactly what was existing on the dead page previously.

For example, this screenshot below is a 404 page on Drift’s website.

I found the broken link from this article.

To know what was existing on this page, I searched for its previous history using the Wayback machine and this is what I discovered:

As you can see, the post is an in-depth guide on “Demand Generation” covering the following sub-topics:

What is demand generation?

Why is demand generation important?

Who’s responsible for demand generation?

How to do demand generation

Implement strategic demand generation tactics

Demand generation vs. Lead generation

Demand generation metrics: how to measure your efforts

Demand gen benchmarking: how are companies like yours generating demand?

Demand generation tools & technologies

To recreate this page, you'll need to write an in-depth piece of content on demand generation covering these sub-topics and more. That way, the website(s) linking to the broken link will be happy to link to yours instead. This is because you've provided a replacement that’ll add value to their audience.

In contrast, if you reach out to these websites and suggest your service page as a replacement for the broken link, they���d most likely not link to it.

Send follow-up emails

Don’t send one email and call it a day. Rather, you should have a follow-up sequence (think two to four emails) in place to remind the people you’ve reached out to previously about your email, and why a broken link on their page isn’t great for user experience.

Doing this helps you land more links. This is because the person you reached out to has a lot going on in their life, and might have skipped responding to your initial email. By following up with them, you’ll be top of mind, and if your pitch is a good fit, they’ll be more likely to respond to you.

Conclusion

It’s rare to find a website without a broken link. The reason is simple: most website owners and blog managers link to external content from their pages and don’t really monitor the content they linked to months and years ago.

In some cases, these pieces of content no longer exist online because they were created for a short-term purpose, or perhaps are no longer relevant.

This is a goldmine you can tap into as a marketer. By finding these broken link opportunities the right way, you can build relevant links for your website and pages to help you rank higher in the SERPs.

Join the conversation: Tweet your questions and comments about broken link building using #MozBlog!

https://ift.tt/3vrPzIn