Awhile back we announced the launch of Easy By Design, our web design operation designed to take advantage of the contacts and ideas we’ve developed over the past year.
Today, Dave and I met in Waterford, Ontario, for a few hours of “working” mixed with a short game of Warmachine and me proving how crappy I am at Guitar Hero II. Generally what we came up with was a new way to make use of back link scans for marketing to our competition’s customers.
I’m sure you’ve noticed that a number of web designers, web hosts, pre-made scripts, etc., often require that you link to their home page as a form of advertising - but by using back link scans or searching for specific key phrases, you can turn this against them.
How?
Well, if you have access to a tool which does back link scans, it’s quite easy: simply see who is linking to your competition’s home page. In our case the target was Designersi.com, a company selling an inferior product for more than twice as much.
Using a back link scan, we can clearly see a good number of pages coming up. We can see there are 73 sites linking to our competition, and 68 of them are coming from the same IP address. So, considering these guys are selling a package with mandatory hosting, we can easily surmise that they have 68 clients that we can target with emails or direct mail (snail mail).
Now you don’t necessarily NEED to have software to do this, however it makes it much easier, as doing manual searches on Google tends to bring back a large number of duplicate results. We can also find this information by searching for [powered by designersi.com] and going through the results.
As you can see, the unfiltered results come back as 641. Clearly there is a pretty big difference in the numbers, but for the most part if you put some effort into to it, you should come up with the same thing. I went through the first 70 results Google generated and found about 15 sites to mail to; I will find the rest using Seo Elite.
Really, this is something that’s quite basic and easy to use, but it’s not something for everyone. I’d imagine web designers or web hosts operating on a more local basis could do well using this. but thats about where my creativity runs dry. I’ve already begun putting the mailing list together, and hope to have it done next week - so when we have some numbers, good or bad, I’ll let you know!
