As we all know, Inbound Marketing is based on content. But you have to publish a lot of relevant content to be considered as a leader in your market and it takes time and resources to wright all that content and to publish it properly.

Sometimes you don’t have the time to wait for the ROI of such approach and you just need marketing qualified leads rapidly. This is a way to identify them, based on other people’s content.

1.  How does it work?

Start by finding articles relevant to the problem you solve.

You’re going to want to find articles that address the same problem that your product or service solves.

Let’s say that you’re launching a new version of your visitor management software. You’ll want to search for articles that target similar keywords as those from your product launch campaign.

From this one piece of content, there are numerous people who have demonstrated that they’re looking for a solution to a specific problem.

They’ve engaged with the content, now all you need to do is tease them out.  

The very first step will be to create a spreadsheet; this is effectively your outreach list. The exact columns depends on the information you need, but undoubtedly you’re going to want columns for Name, Contact Info, Email, Company and anything else that will allow you to personalize your email to them later.

So, let’s start with getting authors.

2.  How to extract authors from their posts?

For the author of each post, you’ll want the following information:

• Name
• Contact info
• Social profiles

You’re also going to want to look for anything else that can help you personalize a future message to them (think latest tweets, recent articles, etc).

Her you can find some tools to do that: http://www.lifehack.org/articles/communication/8-tools-to-find-someone-online.html

You can also do some google research, once you have their name.

Now, we’re going to target commenters, too.

3.  How to extract commenters from posts?

People tend to comment on posts that interest them. They’re engaged enough that they’re asking additional questions, which shows that they have a specific pain point that needs solving.

In most cases, comments redirect to the individual’s web page – so now I just need to extract them.

There’s a bunch of URL extractors for free on the internet. I personally use this one: http://www.marketingignite.com/link-extractor.php

You simply put in a URL and it will catch all of the links on the page. They are grouped in order, and it’s relatively painless to find the ones that belong to the comments section.

Just look for the section where there are a lot of URLs that do not point at the author’s domain. From there, you can simply use the above extension to get the information you need.

Now, let’s grab the linkers and sharers.

4.  How to extract linkers from posts?

This one’s pretty straightforward.

Of the posts you’re working with, there are people who will have read the post, commented on it and committed it to memory. Then, at a later date, they might link back to the post in an article they write.

Articles that link to useful resources indicate to Google that the author is citing their sources, but they’re also relevant to us in the context of this strategy. It’s likely that these other posts strive to solve a similar problem, and have authors and commenters who belong to a similar target market.

It’s easy to take the post and put it into Moz’s OpenSiteExplorer to find all of the linking domains to it.

Even with a free account, I can export these links and add them to my document.

5.  How to extract sharers from posts

To complete our outreach document, we simply have to add sharers. These are people that have demonstrated their interest by sharing relevant posts with their social network.

There is at least one solid way to retrace social shares: Twitter Search.

Simply hit advanced search, then put the title in “This Exact Phrase,” then, when the results populate, hit “All” (instead of “Top”).

This will show you all the influencers who have shared the post. You can head over to their Twitter profiles, on which they will usually have their website and name.

6.  Converting prospects to sign ups in three simple steps

By now you’ve managed to build a list of authors, commenters and sharers in your target space by leveraging content entirely written by other people.

But that’s only half the battle – the other half is getting them to care about what you’re doing.

6.1.      Step 1: Create your landing page

You’re going to need a place for people to opt in to hear about updates for your product, and that means you need a landing page. For example:

6.2.      Step 2: Engage with them

I’ll be the first to admit that engaging with a list of hundreds of influencers is daunting to the point of impractical.

But the fact is that engagement will increase your conversions. If they know who you are, they’re more likely to care about what you’re doing.

If you’re feeling overwhelmed, consider picking the top 25 or so on your list who you’d really like to win over and focus your efforts on them.

If you’re looking for ways to engage with your list, I suggest the following:

• Comment on their blogs
• Subscribe to their newsletter and respond to their messages
• Follow them on social media
• Share and link to their posts

Overtime, you’ll get noticed – and I’m willing to bet they’ll be more responsive to you when you finally reach out to them directly.

6.3.      Step 3: Outreach

At the end of the day, it all comes down to the pitch.

Now is as probably as good time as ever to talk about cold outreach versus spam. After all, there is a difference – cold outreach is NOT spam.

But that requires that you meet these six conditions:

• Don’t misrepresent who you are in the email.
• Don’t use misleading subject lines.
• Identify if the email is an ad.
• Include your business address, such as a PO box.
• Give them an opt-out option.
• Honor opt-outs.

While covering the above is necessary to ensure you are not spamming anyone, it still does not necessarily make for a perfect pitch. Here are the characteristics of a good pitch email:

• Personalize it. Do not send mass emails!
• Be honest about what you’re asking for.
• Keep it succinct.
• Offer something of value to them and their audience. For example:
  • Giving them a discount when the product is launched
  • Offer them access to your beta before anyone else
  • Offer to prioritize any advice/feedback they give

Here’s what we could sent out when we were soliciting feedback on our new idea:

7.  Final thoughts

Over the course of one month we could speak with as many people as we could to get feedback about our new version. This built relationships with them, and down the line led to them being promoters when you finally released the new version.