Paddy Moogan Blog

Link Building: Tips For Getting The Most Out Of Exclusive Content Placements

15th February 2012 · Paddy · No Comments »

When doing link building outreach for clients which involves pitching a piece of content, I’ve often been asked if the target website can have the content as an exclusive.  More often than not, the people asking this are medium – large media type websites, magazines or newspapers.  So they have the potential to be very powerful links and to help you reach a very wide audience, as well as getting a nice spike of traffic to the client site.

However there are a few disadvantages of agreeing to an exclusive:

• You can’t offer your content to anyone else during the exclusivity period which seriously limits your link building efforts
• If the site is a big one, many people will credit them for the content and they will probably get most of the links in the first few days – these are the links your client should be getting

If your goal at the start of the project was to get links to your client, these disadvantages are a big problem!  Having said that, getting a nice guaranteed link, traffic and exposure from a big website is tempting.

Lets take a real example.  Say you pitched a piece of content to Wired and they responded positively and want to write an article about your content – on the condition that they publish it first and have exclusivity for two days.  You know that this could be very valuable to your client and they’d be happy, but its not optimal in terms of link building.

What would you do?

Personally, I’d see what else they could offer me which would get me extra link benefit.  How?  See what other websites they control and are affiliated with and see if as part of the exclusive, they can give me links on these sites too.  Here are a few ways to do that.

1) Start simple – check their website.

First place to start is the footer of the website, here is the one for Wired.com:

Straight away you can see the other websites that are part of the same group, you also have the dropdown menus which include international websites.  Sure not all of these will be relevant to your content, but more often than not, some of them will be.  Lets take a better example from Football365:

If you are promoting a piece of sports content, you have loads of relevant websites here to try and get links from too.

2) Check who owns the website and checkout their website

Many of the largest magazines and media outlets will be part of a larger group, much like Wired are above.  However they will not always make it as obvious and easy to find the related sites.  Again, lets take an example.  Imagine you were negotiation an exclusive with Amateur Photographer, at first glance you can’t see any associated sites in their header or footer.  There are a few links but nothing clear cut.  But notice what else is in the footer:

Notice the IPC Media Ltd bit?  These guys are a huge media group who run a lot of publications, here is the full list on their website:

I know that just having this list doesn’t guarantee you are going to get a link, you still have to work hard but when negotiating for an exclusive, having these up your sleeve as additional requests could pay off big time.

3) Getting more sneaky – finding connected sites which aren’t obvious

I’ve been using this technique for a while and its so quick and easy, that I don’t just limit myself to using it when negotiating exclusives.  I’ve used it on smaller sites to see what other sites someone owns or controls.

Head over to Spyonweb:

Simply enter the URL of the site you are speaking to and you will get details of websites which are associated with the same IP address, Google Analytics account or Google Webmaster Tools account.  I wouldn’t rely upon shared IP address that much though, if a website is on shared hosting, you will get a lot of other sites which they probably don’t own.

Note – I don’t bother with this much on websites I haven’t got a positive reply from.  It can drain time so I’d only tend to do this if I’m speaking to the site owner and trying to see what else they may be able to offer.

If you find sites on the same Google Analytics or Webmaster Tools account, go and take a look at them and see if they are relevant for your content.  If they are, see if the owner is willing to drop links to your content on those sites too.  Be careful not to come across as a stalker though when telling them you know about their other websites!

To wrap up, exclusives on link building can be of great benefit as long as you make sure you are getting as much bang for your buck as possible.  These methods should help you to do that and to negotiate a good deal for your client.