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The Best Free (or Cheap) Tools for Blogger and Influencer Outreach

April 30, 2013 by Adam Sherk

Followerwonk Twitter bio searchBlogger and influencer outreach is an area with strong crossover between PR, audience development and link building.

For publishers it typically involves identifying users that are sharing, discussing and linking to content from your brands and their competitors, and about specific topics. Then building relationships with those users over time and coming up with ideas for outreach, content development and promotion. But the same general approach applies to any industry.

Social monitoring tools like Radian6 and PR suites like Vocus and Cision offer the greatest range of functionality for research and contact management. However utilizing enterprise-level tools is not always an option for smaller organizations, or even large ones with budget constraints.

Fortunately there are plenty of useful tools that are free or inexpensive. I’ve put together a list of the ones that I typically use and recommend to others. Each tool is free unless otherwise noted.

Finding Bloggers and Influencers

Followerwonk
Followerwonk from SEOmoz is a great tool for researching Twitter users. The Twitter bio search allows you to easily find and evaluate users in specific areas. Just search on something like “fashion blogger,” “foodie” or whatever topic you need and you’re on your way. You can also sort and analyze your own followers to get a better understanding of the potential contact points you already have, or take a look at competing brands. The basic functions are free. An SEOmoz PRO membership is required for full use of the tool.

Topsy
Plug any URL into Topsy and see who tweeted it and which users were most influential (and which have a blog). Or search specific domains, brands and topics for more extensive research. You can also use Topsy Analytics to compare profiles, domains or keywords and see what content has received the most links.

Klout and Kred
The value and methodology of services like Klout and Kred has been much debated and discussed, so I’ll leave you to your own opinion there. But if you are looking for a simple way to do a relative comparison of users, these tools offer a basic metric you can use. Klout’s search functionality also lets you find influencers on specific topics.

Google+ Tools
Twitter is often the easiest social gateway to finding bloggers since people with a blog tend to be on Twitter too. But Google+ is a decent method as well, since Google Authorship participation results in people adding links to their blogs and sites they contribute to on their profile. And since social media and Google+ in particular have an impact on SEO there are also secondary benefits to locating influencers there.

CircleCount and FindPeopleonPlus are decent databases of Google+ users. All my + is a useful tool for evaluating the activity and engagement of specific profiles, as I did in my post on Google+ engagement for news sites. You can also use Google+ Ripples to examine shares and comments for a specific URL or Google+ post and see how it spread.

Pinterest Tools
If Pinterest is a priority, there are a range of Pinterest analytics tools available that can help you find brand enthusiasts and influential users. Most are fairly inexpensive. Curalate, Piqora, PinReach and PinAlerts are among the popular choices.

Finding Mentions and Links

Fresh Web Explorer
Fresh Web Explorer is a new tool from SEOmoz that lets you find recent mentions and links, searchable by URL, domain, brand, keyword, etc. The tool indexes millions of RSS feeds and a Feed Authority score is applied to each. SEOmoz PRO membership is required to use it.

Google Blog Search
While it is no longer included in the main navigation on Google, Google Blog Search is still out there and it’s a decent way to find recent posts and links, and to research blogs.

Google Alerts
Google Alerts don’t seem to be working as well as they used to, but it’s still a useful way to get instant notification of new mentions and links.

Mention
I’ve been using Mention for a few months now and I’m happy with it. It finds mentions and links in Web content and social media, and you can use it in a desktop app or a browser, or just get e-mail alerts. One thing I like is that it finds links in tweets that did not include your @username, which you might not have otherwise noticed. There is a basic free plan plus some more robust plans that are reasonably priced.

Talkwalker Alerts
Talkwalker Alerts is free alternative to Google Alerts. I’ve just started using it but it seems to work well.

Contact Management

Once you’ve started your research and developed various lists for bloggers, influencers, advocates and all those other fun names, it is important to develop some kind of system for tracking activity and interactions.

BuzzStream
BuzzStream offers nice functionality in this area. It is more popular in SEO circles for managing link building activities, but they also have a PR & Social Media tool that offers good functionality for blogger and influencer relations.

Nimble
Another option is Nimble, a social CRM system. While it appears to be somewhat sales focused, the features seem well suited to other types of relationship management too. Thanks to Jim Thornton for suggesting it.

Excel or Google Docs
If a paid tool is not an option, you can always create spreadsheets in Excel or Google Docs for tracking activity and contact management. A shared Google Doc is a workable option for team collaboration.

So that’s a good group of tools to get you started. What else are you using?

Please let me know in the comments and I’ll expand the list as appropriate.

Related posts:

  1. The Best Free Tools for Twitter Analytics
  2. Free Tools for Monitoring Hot Search Trends
  3. The Best Tools for Keyword Research, Competitive Analysis and Trending Topics
  4. The Best Social Media Analytics Tools for Publishers
  5. Survey: Pinterest a Great Source of Links for Publishers. What Types of Sites Get the Most Links?

Comments

  1. Matt Gratt says

    April 30, 2013 at 11:51 am

    Hey Adam,
    Thanks for including BuzzStream in your write-up – we really appreciate it.
    thanks
    matt

  2. David O'Donnell says

    April 30, 2013 at 8:39 pm

    Google Webmaster Tools is actually pretty great for new link discovery. Once logged in checkout Traffic > Links To Your Site > More > then the ‘Download Latest Links’ option.

  3. matt gratt says

    May 1, 2013 at 12:49 pm

    Now that I have a little more time, I’ll leave a useful comment 😉

    One tool we love is the Scraper extension for Chrome. It can be found at this doozy of URL – https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/scraper/mbigbapnjcgaffohmbkdlecaccepngjd?hl=en

    You can use it to take any list – of sites, influencers, blogrolls, or really anything – and get all of the links into a spreadsheet with just one right click. Then you can port that list to tool of your choice (BuzzStream, another CRM, Excel, whatever you may be using) and go to work.

    Scraper is especially great to use with influencer search/identification tools that don’t have .CSV exports – so you can spend your time doing outreach and marketing – not copying and pasting into spreadsheets.

    And, perhaps the best part, is its price. Scraper is free.

  4. Greg Shuey says

    May 2, 2013 at 3:15 pm

    Nice list Adam! Building relationships and seeding content is a powerful marketing strategy and you just made the day of any good digital marketer.

  5. Adam Sherk says

    May 2, 2013 at 5:58 pm

    Matt – My pleasure, happy to include BuzzStream as it’s a useful tool. And thanks for the tip on the Scraper extension, I hadn’t seen that before.

    David – Latest Links in GWT is good one; thanks. That totally slipped my mind when I was putting this together.

    Greg – Thanks, I’m glad you found it useful. I’ve been recommending some of these lately and I thought it would good to publish a roundup.

  6. Nick Stamoulis says

    May 7, 2013 at 4:15 pm

    Although Google Alerts are simple, and may not update instantaneously, what I like about the alerts is that is breaks through the clutter. In SEO, we spend a large percentage of our day analyzing data and utilizing social media channels for our clients. Sometimes it is easy to forget to check our own data – so having the alerts sent to my inbox help remind me of how our content is performing.

  7. Jack says

    May 10, 2013 at 3:55 am

    Nice post, this is very important for people doing SEO. I know a good backlinks checker: http://siteexplorer.info. It’s free with no limits.

  8. Julie Hong says

    February 3, 2014 at 2:23 pm

    Hi Adam, to keep you updated on our product: Talkwalker Alerts are now also available on HootSuite! To try it out yourself, simply install the Talkwalker Alerts app on HootSuite to monitor and share content the fastest way in one single platform. More info at http://bit.ly/1aW01hb – let me know how it works for you 🙂

  9. Adam Sherk says

    February 7, 2014 at 9:52 am

    Thanks Julie, I’ll check it out.

  10. gary says

    February 15, 2015 at 3:33 pm

    Hi Adam,
    A few other tools for influencer contact management worth adding to the list…

    http://www.prezly.com
    http://www.perfectfit.io
    http://www.submarinecrm.com

    and here are a few nice tools to show of results of your influencer relations work…

    http://www.releasd.com
    http://www.coveragebook.com

    Cheers
    Gary

  11. Adam Sherk says

    February 17, 2015 at 7:36 am

    Thanks Gary

  12. Patricia says

    February 19, 2015 at 4:58 am

    Hi Adam, really great post with tons of awesome tools. Thank you so much for including Mention 🙂 Happy to hear that you enjoy using it. If you ever want to share some feedback, we would love to hear from you.

    Patricia
    Community Support @Mention

  13. Dave says

    May 13, 2015 at 8:34 pm

    Hey Adam

    Great round up here! Personally I love FollowerWonk – I think it’s amazing how many twitter followers you can get so quickly.

    BTW, I have another tool that you might be interested in adding to this list, I’m going to shoot you an email if it’s alright!

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About Adam Sherk

Adam Sherk is an SEO and PR consultant helping publishers with digital strategy and audience development, including enterprise SEO, public relations and social media marketing.

Adam is VP SEO and Digital Strategy for Define Media Group.

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