If you are a writer, speaker, or small business professional you know the importance of building your online presence or “platform.” Getting visitors to come to your website or blog is paramount in building your business. While there are many factors in a successful search engine optimization (SEO) campaign, having high quality websites linking to your website is one of the most important.
Klout is a social media tool that can help you find influential people in your genre. You’ll need a Twitter or Facebook account to sign up for the service. Once you have created an account you can search for people using their Twitter names.
Let me give you an example of how this works.
Let’s say you are a woman writer that writes for the Christian marketplace. You want to build your online platform to get the word out about a new upcoming book. You have been active on Twitter for a while and you sign up with Klout.
Once you are on Klout you can click the friends button and see all the people you follow on Twitter. It brings up a list with their tag line bios.
You find someone that matches your genre. You are looking for a woman entrepreneur who can help you get the word out. Carece looks like a good person to start with.
Carece has a good Klout score and is influential about entrepreneurship and marketing. Two attributes that match your criteria. Now you want to see if she has any lists in Klout.
You click on the Klout lists button and you realize you just hit the jackpot. Carece has five lists and two of them are just about women business people.
You are intrigued by her list on thought leaders. You open the list and peruse the 31 users listed. One profile instantly jumps out. Jeff Goins matches on two fronts.
Jeff has authority in Writing and Christianity, along with having a very high Klout score. You click on the Twitter link and follow him and then you click on his web link to see if he has a website or blog. Sure enough, Jeff has a blog.
You take a look at his blog sidebar and peruse his recent articles. This is where the back links can come in. Jeff has a lot of influential content.
These are great articles that relate directly to writing and would be very beneficial not only to read, but to comment on. When you leave a comment, the WordPress blog asks for your website link and provides an automatic backlink to your blog or website and related content.
You find a few articles that sound interesting and read through them. Then you take a few minutes to leave thoughtful and insightful comments. You bookmark the site and sign up for the RSS feed so you get updates in Google Reader as Jeff updates with new posts.
The Secret to SEO. Now you have seen the process of finding influential people in your niche. The secret is to visit regularly and build relationships with other bloggers. Since your comments provide a link back to your site, if you leave insightful comments, many readers will click on your link and follow you back.
With Klout, it’s easy to find people in your genre and add them to a list of people you regularly follow. The more you comment and build relationships the better. When your new book comes out, you can leave comments about it and possibly be a guest blogger on a few different sites. This will instantly give your new book a traffic boost. The secret is building relationships! Improve your SEO ranking today.
Question: Have you found influential blogs in your Genre?