Blog Reviews – New Feature
We are launching a new feature today, which is probably unique to our SEO software. We call it “blog reviews”. Just in a brief, the idea is to automate the process of finding relevant blogs to your website, and sending the bloggers a request to review your service.
Why Blog Reviews Are Important
If you don’t know why backlinks are important, then you should probably go and find yourself some beginners SEO tutorial, really!
Now, there are plenty of ways to get backlinks.
Those include: web directories, forums (in signature and in a post), link exchanges or just asking for someone to add your link in his recommended links page.
We don’t know exactly how Google analyzes backlinks, but it would be very surprising if they don’t apply some logic to see how natural the link looks like. Most of the above sources, might look suspicious. For example, a link from a signature of a forum post is almost totally unnatural. It is obvious that someone is trying to promote a site and this is not a real recommendation. When you look at a link that is in a links page, like “recommended sites” section in some websites, this is too, usually a result of some kind of link exchange or paid link, so this is not very natural link. So, what would be the perfect natural link? I think, it is a link Embedded within a blog post or a forum post. This is not science, but common sense. I remember stating this argument in some SEO forum about two years ago, and a group of SEOs argued that a link is a link. But, as a software developer, I know how easy it is to create such algorithms that would try to estimate how natural the link is, and it is naive to think Google developers don’t think the same. So, we want a natural looking link, from a relevant website, and a link from a blog, relevant to your niche, embedded within a review of your service, is probably as perfect as a link can get.
Why not do this yourself?
Honestly, you could do that yourself. Just look for relevant blogs, find their contact details (usually either web form or email), and send them an offer . That should work, but the problem is that this would take a lot of your time to do this manually, and I myself never got to do this thoroughly just because this is a time consuming and boring task. Another issue, is that you never remember who you’ve asked in the past, so this process becomes messy and the bloggers stop taking your seriously.
The Solution
Our new feature allows you to automate this entire process, and make it an easy and manageable task. You’ll be able to get a few blog reviews for your website each month, from great sources, and it will all be managed from your account. Although this is automated, you are still in full control, and decide which blogs you want to communicate with, and what offer you are sending them. So, this is not the same as paying some cheap resources to do that for you, and discovering that they created more damage than any good.
OK, it’s time to show how this thing works.
Creating a Blog Offer
The first thing you need to do, is create a blog offer. This blog offer will contain both the details that we use to search for relevant blogs, and the details that would use to communicate with the blogger. Think before you create those blog offers, cause we have limits on the amount we allow per month.
Here is the screen used to fill the blog offer:
The “offer name” is simply the name we use internally for your blog offer.
The keyword and localization are used to search the relevant blogs for your website. Make sure you use the most effective search terms for your website.
The rest of the details in the blog offer are used to fill the request that is sent to the blogger. Probably, the most important factor for the success of the request, is the message. You should offer money for the review, Remember that the blogger needs to spend time for writing the review. Also, he/she exposes your service to his users, which is worth some money too. You should leave the amount you offer for subsequent emails, but make sure the blogger understands you are willing to pay for this service. The amount should not be written, because the blog offer will be used for multiple blogs. Here is an example:
“Hi, My name is xxx and I’m the owner of xxx, which is a site for …
I like your blog, and I’m interested in being reviewed on your blog.
I’m willing to pay for your time and efforts.
Please let me know if you’re interested,
Your name.”
Submitting the Blog Review Requests
Once you finish filling the blog offer details and press the “add offer”, it will take a minute or so for SheerSEO to find the relevant blogs. Those blogs will be shown in the second tab of the blog reviews screen, called “blog selection”. See screenshot:
You see here a list of blogs that should fit the keyword you selected for this profile, but some might be wrong for you, and this is why you need to still chose which of those you want to use.
As you see, the list provides the PageRank and the Alexa rank per each blog, which should help you chose the right blogs for you. Of course, common logic should help here too, like you shouldn’t ask your competitor to right about you(:
When you press the submit button (triangle button on the actions column), SheerSEO will send an email or fill out a contact form with the details you have set in the blog offer. Sometimes the contact form needs a captcha, so you would be asked to fill this on the screen.
Once you submit to a blog, it will show an indication for that on the screen. You can also indicate that this blog in irrelevant by pressing the reject button in the actions column. The blogs offers, with all the information regarding the blogs found, and the indications regarding the requests made will stay on your account, so this helps you also organize the communications done during this process.
A Word About Spam
Some may see this type of work as spam. I tend to disagree with that, because we communicate with the blog owner using his/her contact form or contact email. If this is a secret, he/she shouldn’t put that on a public page over the internet. We don’t just send this from a program, but you are in control of who you send this offer to. Also, the blog is selected to be relevant, and assuming you send a review offer that makes sense, and not some kind of advertising for your products, this is not spam. This should be exactly the type of offer the blogger wants to hear about.
Leave a Comment
I totally agree with you about the spamming thing. Sometimes I get hurt when they always think that I’m making a spam out of this. Great post!