Content Planning

Content planning is critical to outreach success. Here, get the latest strategies from the Citation Labs team, supported by our independent research, surveys, and opinions from the experts.

Scalable Link Building Ideas for Location Service Pages

By Garrett French

July 6, 2023

Topics: Citation Labs News, Content Planning, Content Strategy, Enterprise Link Building Tips, Local Link Building

Scalable Link Building Ideas for Location Service Pages: Cleaning Services Edition Local sales pages present one of link building’s greatest challenges. Here’s our approach – as always we begin with a deep dive on a URL to understand the target customer, as well as the “decision space” within which purchases occur. Always Start With The ... Read more

Link Building Brainstorm: Panelboards, Switchboards and Switchgear

By Garrett French

June 6, 2023

Topics: Content Planning, Content Strategy, Enterprise Link Building Tips

Building links to a category page about… Panelboards? Switchboards? Switchgear? Where do you even start with a page like this on se.com? Here’s the above the scroll view on desktop (doubtful there’s much mobile traffic): OOF. Visit the page then come back as we unpack our approach to building links into seemingly inscrutable, obscure or ... Read more

Link Building Services
in an AI World

By Garrett French

February 6, 2023

Topics: Citation Labs News, Content Planning, Content Strategy, Link Building Industry Insights

Google’s scared of OpenAI’s significant release of ChatGPT (as are Facebook and Microsoft, but let’s stay focused on search for this article). From what I’ve gathered, Google’s fears AI primarily because its answer context doesn’t provide clickable advertising opportunities. This lack of advertising opportunity (and a troubling, persistent bias problem) is what led to Google ... Read more

Links to Sales Pages: Total Overhaul for 2021-2022

By James Wirth

June 11, 2021

Topics: Campaign Creation, Citation Labs News, Content Planning, Content Strategy, Enterprise Link Building Tips, Intro to Link Building, Outreach Tips, Prospecting, Technical Link Building Tips, The Story Approach, Understanding & Serving Audiences, Webinar

Earlier this week, Garrett and I presented a 90-minute webinar that showcased a start-to-finish approach to building links to sales pages. Hosted by SEMrush, about 500 people registered and nearly 400 watched the broadcast live on YouTube and Periscope. Thank you to all who took time out of your day to join us, and a ... Read more

Prospecting for Blogs Using Auto-Complete Suggestions

Finding Unique and Untapped Audience Facets and Topics

By Garrett French

September 5, 2018

Topics: CL Tools: Link Prospector, Content Planning, Prospecting, Understanding & Serving Audiences

(NOTE: This article walks through a prospecting approach that includes mass-scraping auto-complete suggestions using a tool that we have not made public. It’s useful for prospectors even if you don’t have the tool, but just wanted to warn you before hand.) Also, here’s a webinar on the same topic: OK so let’s say you want ... Read more

‘Hey Saturday’ Online Dating Photographer on BBC [Video]

When Saskia Nelson set up her business she decided that she didn't want to be just another wedding photographer. Instead, she decided to specialize in photographing people for their online dating profiles.

By Ken McGaffin

April 21, 2017

Topics: Content Planning, Enterprise Link Building Tips, The Story Approach

When Saskia Nelson set up her business she decided that she didn’t want to be just another wedding photographer. Instead, she decided to specialize in photographing people for their online dating profiles. Her niche business, ‘Hey Saturday’ has thrived and grabbed a lot of media attention, including a wonderful piece on the BBC, The woman on ... Read more

Video Review: The Sleep Matters Club

So who are the influencers in your market? Dreams.co.uk shows you can go very wide in your choice!

By Ken McGaffin

February 3, 2017

Topics: Citation Labs News, Content Planning, Content Strategy

The Sleep Matters Club from a UK-based bed and mattress company, Dreams.co.uk takes a highly creative approach to content marketing. In creating content for their blog, you might expect they’d concentrate on sleep psychologists and sleep experts. That’s what many of us would do – but that’s not good enough Dreams! So how about a ... Read more

7 Elements of a Successful Guest Post Campaign

How to Brand Your Expertise in the Blogosphere

By Lindsay Miller

March 21, 2016

Topics: Campaign Creation, Content Planning, Content Strategy

In our blog posts and webinars, we often hat-tip our content creation team. Lindsay Miller is this content curator. She, along with our other copywriters, develop the product behind our outreach campaigns. Perhaps you’ve been avoiding guest posting because it seems like such a pain. You have your own blog, and you write for it regularly. ... Read more

Webinar: Citation Labs’s 2nd Annual Live Brainstorm

Eric Ward, Shari Thurow and Garrett French on Link Building and Site Usability

By Garrett French

December 16, 2015

Topics: Content Planning, Expert Interviews, Link Building Industry Insights, Webinar

We had way too much fun live brainstorming with Eric Ward last year, so this holiday season, we did it again. And this time we invited site usability expert (and Citation Labs friend), Shari Thurow. We gathered site suggestions from webinar participants before the session and chose four to analyze off-the-cuff during the webinar: At ... Read more

11 Email Experiments + The Citation Labs Outreach Best Practices Record

Content Outreach Tactics for Non-Telepaths

By Megan Hannay

November 10, 2015

Topics: Agency Hacks, Content Planning, Enterprise Link Building Tips, Mission-Based Link Building

This is a post made of 4 parts: 1. Outreach elements we test (and recommend others test in their own campaigns) 2. Citation Labs experiment examples 3. The Citation Labs Best Practices Record 4. A webinar conversation between Garrett French and Megan Hannay on Citation Labs Outreach Hacks. The first rule of outreach is that there are ... Read more

PR Planning for Newbs Webinar

Scheduling Surprisies

By Megan Hannay

October 14, 2015

Topics: Content Planning, Content Strategy, Public Relations, Webinar

This fall at Citation Labs: We just launched our first website refresh in 4 years, and it seems that you all are liking the new look. We recently wrote a case study on our first PR client. Today, we completed our first Citation Labs team webinar. Garrett was missed, and he’ll certainly continue to share his ... Read more

Plan for Spontaneity

Developing An Annual PR Promotion Plan

By Ken McGaffin

September 30, 2015

Topics: Campaign Creation, Content Planning, Link Building Industry Insights, Public Relations

Sign up for our 10/7 webinar more insights & tips on PR thinking for link building & content teams. Your promotion doesn’t happen in isolation. You have to compete for attention and links with competitor activity, industry events, new product launches, research reports and breaking news stories. If you launch a piece of content at ... Read more

Webinar: Agency Hacks 2

Plan to Kick @$$ With Content Calendars

By Megan Hannay

July 24, 2015

Topics: Campaign Creation, Content Planning, Enterprise Link Building Tips, Webinar

Watch our recent webinar, Agency Hacks 2, to learn some of our most stellar secrets and favorite link building tactics. We've included a summary with corresponding points in the video, so you can jump to tactics that you're most interested in.

Earn 50+ Authority Links/Month

How To Build a Content & Production Calendar

By Garrett French

July 15, 2015

Topics: Agency Hacks, Content Planning, Enterprise Link Building Tips

Our "Agency Hacks 2" webinar is coming Thursday, July 23. Learn how to put some of the tips from this article into practice, and add on to your link builder tool belt with more organization and enterprise-level execution tips.

601 Linker-Valued Audiences

Serve Them Well, Earn More Links

By Megan Hannay

May 14, 2015

Topics: Content Planning, Understanding & Serving Audiences

Our content creation series has been pretty theory-heavy thus far. In an effort to make our ideas more concrete, we developed out a working list of 601 potential linker-valued audiences for your content. A linker-valued audience is just that - an audience of people who are valued, served and even cherished by linkers.

Agency Hacks for the In-House Link Builder

Our 10/17 Webinar

By Garrett French

October 17, 2014

Topics: Agency Hacks, Citation Labs News, Content Planning, Content Strategy, Webinar

We held our first Webinar - "Agency Hacks for the In-House Link Building Team" on Friday, October 17. If you missed it, or would like to watch again, the video and Webinar notes are below. Or, to skip to a hack or audience question of the video, check out the minute-by-minute here.

Finding Highly Productive Research Phrases

Link Prospector Mastery

By Garrett French

May 12, 2012

Topics: Agency Hacks, CL Tools: Link Prospector, Content Planning, Enterprise Link Building Tips

The Link Prospector takes your research phrases and combines them with tactic-specific footprints. This is what we use to find prospects for you. Your research phrases determine how useful and relevant your prospects will be. Learn our three rules for selecting successful research phrases.

5 Key Units of Expertise

On the Classification of Expertise Structures for Content Marketers

By Garrett French

June 29, 2011

Topics: Content Planning, Content Strategy, Link Building Industry Insights

Through marketing with tips and tip inventory creation I came to think of tips as the smallest expressible unit of expertise. From a research query perspective, tips are quite easy to extract from a market's community of practice.

But what about larger and more complex units of expertise?

48 Query Stems for Creating a Tip Inventory

For Content Marketing Research

By Garrett French

June 16, 2011

Topics: Content Planning, Content Strategy, Technical Link Building Tips

Combine these tip-stems with your subject matter phrase roots to create an initial body of research queries for use in your favorite search engine or search scraper tool. These queries are meant to be used in conjunction with your tip inventory spreadsheet.

11 Suggested Columns for Your Tip Inventory Spreadsheet

The How-To for "How-To"s

By Garrett French

Topics: Content Planning, Content Strategy, Technical Link Building Tips

Tips are the distilled, actionable wisdom of subject matter experts. Tips become apparent to the subject matter expert as his general principles encounter reality. For the content marketer, creating a tip inventory of a market's knowledge provides a deeper understanding of a market's pains and opens up the opportunities outlined in this post.

A Brief Introduction to “Subject Matter Phrases”

For Content Marketing Research

By Garrett French

June 15, 2011

Topics: Content Planning, Technical Link Building Tips

Every market comprises a universe of subject matter phrases that, once discovered and cataloged, provide a marketing researcher's basis for mapping, understanding and engaging that market or market segment with content. These phrases enable a researcher to identify a market vertical's content needs, its subject matter experts, its publishers and its potential content-promotion targets.