Authority sites are of course great places to get listed. But not only that, through link analysis such sites are the key to discovering a vast online community of thousands of link prospects. In this article, I’ll look first at the content opportunities of a site and then I’ll take you through a simple link analysis process that will uncover many high quality prospects, if you have a new business idea and want to find ways to reach a potential new market.
Researching that new product from your client
Perhaps your client has got fantastic new business idea or product and you’re looking to get the word out and at the same time get a nice quality link…
…or perhaps you have a retail client that wants to know new and emerging apps for shopping…
…or you want to find the latest start-ups in restaurants and street food…
…or even, discover what impact ‘vertical farming’ will have on the food industry.
These are all marketing questions that have been covered and many are trying to tackle. But a site called Springwise.com have looked at these topics a little more closely over the last week. I’m going to therefore investigate this further using Majestic link building campaigns. As usual, there’s a video based on this article:
Springwise.com’s daily newsletter lists at least three innovations per day, covering many industries from all over the world – and is one of my favourite reads.
Here’s a screenshot of the homepage:
The headlines on the page lead to short stories like this one, “Consumer video reviews made easy“:
The innovations and business ideas are sourced from a community of over 20,000 ‘spotters’ who have signed up to submit suitable new initiatives they come across.So if your client has a project that meets the criteria, there is every reason to submit it to the site.
Other media pick up on stories from Springwise
Ideas published on the site are often picked up by other publications including Wired, Mashable, Financial Times and many others. And so you can get a bonus of additional articles as your story spreads.
So Springwise is a great source of new business ideas, it’s a community you can get involved in and it’s also somewhere you could pitch your own or your client’s initiative – provided of course that it was up to scratch.
I think those are good enough reasons to have a look at the site but now let’s move to the next stage – a link analysis. And I’ll show how you can use Majestic, start with Springwise.com and then further explore the online community around innovation and business ideas, and easily find many more link prospects.
Learning from a Link Profile
Majestic shows that the site attracts links from sites that cover a wide variety of different topics (as can be seen by the Topical Trust Flow section):
Browsing through the 8000+ referring domains to Springwise.com will give you many prospects interested in innovation, small business ideas and promotional campaigns.
This is of course useful, and I can easily expand the reach by looking for resource pages within the results – in other words resource pages that list Springwise.com AND other innovation sites.
Take this link on SmallBizTrends.com: 
The ‘source URL’ points to this article, “10 Best websites for trend spotting“, which links to Springwise.com and 9 other websites that are relevant to trend spotting and innovation. I love this types of article because I can then grab those 10 sites and enter them into Clique Hunter which will discover other sites that link to at least two of them.
The quick search in Clique Hunter finds over 12,000 additional prospects:
The column highlighted in red, ‘Matches’ shows how many of the site are linked to by the prospects Clique Hunter has provided. So in the 3rd result in the diagram, we can see that BrandChannel.com links to 7 of the 10 sites I entered.
And because these domains link to springwise.com, they are clearly interested in the topics of innovation and new businesses – so for a start-up or new business idea, many of them will be prime prospects.
So that’s a pretty useful result for just a little effort. And I can simply repeat this process, i.e. find as many articles as I can that mention ‘the best 10’, ‘the top 20’ and so on. Then collect the sites mentioned, and enter them into Clique Hunter to find even more relevant link prospects.
The potential of the Springwise services
So Springwise.com has been a great starting point to find a huge number of relevant link prospects. However just leaving it there would be leaving lots of value on the table. The aim of the site to is provide an up-to-date, comprehensive database of new ideas and innovations across many sectors worldwide – and this is a potential goldmine for any link builder expanding the type of marketing work they do.
The paid-for service
After a couple of weeks, the articles published on Springwise.com move behind a pay wall and cannot be accessed without paying a fee. However, if you are serious about doing marketing research for your client (desk research as we used to call it when I started my marketing career), this is a service you’ll find useful.
The first product worth considering are the ‘Innovation Snapshots’ – these are curated innovation reports for your particular industry or geographical location. The cost $99 each and you can download a sample report, ‘Innovation Snapshots’ for free. Here’s the innovation snapshot page, https://www.springwise.com/snapshots/.
These reports might be a good idea if you are really pressed for time or you don’t want to do the research yourself. Personally, I like to do my own research and the entry-level price for Springwise.com is pretty reasonable – $115 for a month’s access. If you’re able to spread that cost across a couple of clients, it’s a no-brainer.
There are two main ways I’d use such a service:
1. To do some objective research for my client
Is that brand-new, shiny idea of theirs really new? Using the Springwise database that stretches back to 2002, I can find out.
I’ll be able to see a ton of new ideas in any particular industry, and then do some research to see whether those ideas were a success or failure. I find this useful, particularly for new small business ideas were the owner might not have done comprehensive research.
2. To provide a link analysis of a specific topic (yes, even ‘vertical farming’)
Use the Springwise database to identify relevant stories in a specific market. Collect the domains of the industry specific business ideas that I find, add them all to the Bulk Backlinks tool in Majestic, rank the domains to find the top 10 domains (by either the number of referring domains or by Trust Flow) and then enter these into Clique Hunter to find another raft of relevant link prospects.
Final words
Using Springwise.com and Majestic together is a powerful combination for a business project. It enables me to not only plan a link campaign, but also perform a number of useful marketing research tasks. I think this approach helps link builders expand the range of marketing services that they offer this.
