The Smart Way to Get Traffic and Links

Introduction: Creating Your Own Prospect List

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Marketers define prospects as potential customers, clients, or purchasers. A valuable prospect is sometimes characterized by their loyalty, spending power or potential level of interest, as it relates to specific products or services.

When you are trying to promote your site to bloggers, you should be looking for prospects with the ability to build your brand while sending you targeted traffic. Because prospect development can be a tedious process, I suggest marketing to a core group of individuals, each with established circles of influence.

Instead of targeting a large number of bloggers, focus on the few that matter. You can’t please every single person (impossible endeavor) but you can easily win the favor of a few bloggers. Let them recommend you to their audience.

This is a lot easier, especially if you’re completely new to the industry or niche.

How to Build Up Your List of Prospects

Pick some keywords related to your website or niche and run a search on Technorati, which will give you results ordered according to Technorati authority and favorites.

This gives you a very rough indication of the popularity of a specific blog, which is determined according to the number of links it receives from other blogs. For example, here are search results for marketing and web design.

Another alternative would be to use niche specific ranking lists which rank sites according to specific factors such as the Technorati or Alexa Rank. You can also visit and browse around blog communities like Mybloglog, Bumpzee or BlogCatalog. Look for the active bloggers with a strong reputation on these sites.

After you’ve got a list of relevant blogs, subscribe to their RSS feeds. I would recommend putting them in a separate folder in your feed reader or using a start page to organize your prospects. More on this later.

Why You Should Maintain a Bloggers Prospect List

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The primary reason for having a bloggers prospect list is to gradually get the blogger in question to send you qualified traffic or recommend you to his or her audience, thereby improving your business or personal brand.

A prospect list is an intentional system developed to help you enhance the ability to get a favorable response from specific bloggers on the list. You can determine the amount of time or energy to be spent on each prospect, according to its value as well as its relationship to you.

The second reason for maintaining a prospect list is reciprocation. A lot of the cross-promotion you see online is the result of intentional reciprocation; doing something for someone because he or she did something for you.

Reciprocation is a basic aspect of culture and society. It pervades all human relationships and influences it tremendously. We may do something for someone with the hope (conscious or not) that someone may repay the favor in the future.

Cialdini’s rule of reciprocity explains:

This rule requires that one person try to repay what another person has provided. By obligating the recipient to an act of repayment in the future–the rule for reciprocation allows one individual to give something to another with the confidence that it is not being lost.

The decision to comply with someone’s request is frequently based upon the Rule of Reciprocity. Again, a possible and profitable tactic to gain probable compliance would be to give something to someone before asking for a favor in return.

Keeping a prospect list helps you to systematically record and reciprocate favors done for you, which dramatically improves the quality of the relationship you have.

This will help you to gradually turn bloggers into friends and future assets you can leverage for your business/website.

Adopting the Right Mindset is Important

The prospect list is actionable. You should track your prospects with the attitude of wanting to act upon their content, along with the aim of building a personal and meaningful relationship.

The trick here is not to think of yourself as a yet another reader but as an avid supporter and evangelist. How are these mindsets different?

The first is passive, absorbing information and not fully acting on it. One fades into the crowd and does not stand out from the other readers. In this case, one seeks knowledge or entertainment from the blog and goes no further.

The latter is active, absorbing content, voicing opinions and then sharing or promoting it to everyone else whom one thinks might benefit from it. You react to the blogger’s content while using it as a platform to connect on a personal level.

The more visible you are, the better for your brand and the easier it is to build an advantageous connection.