Different Ways to discover Great Link Building Opportunities in Boring Industries

Are several industries just too boring for link building? This is a very familiar question.
Amid great stories being shared, written about, and linked to every minute, it's easy for link builders to get wedged and wonder how on earth they can come close to competing. But "boring", like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. Any industry, no matter how boring on the surface, has attractive stories just waiting to be exploited by a creative link builder.

 Every business has customers with evils to solve, every business owner has struggles to wrestle with, and every employee has problems to solve in their daily work. These can all make attractive human stories. Journalists, writers, and bloggers – and their readers – are attracted by human stories.

The first step to finding these stories is to kick yourself out of the mindset that the industry you're stressed with is inherently boring. But shifting mindset isn't easy, so a few exercises can help – here are the ones I've developed over the years – they do seem to do the trick.

1. Do a Google News Search and See What Comes Up

If you're working in a boring industry like, say air filters, and then you'll probably see a lot of PR platitudes and poor news stories that aren't really news at all. But keep on and read through a little.

In the air filter industry, I came across an meeting with the CEO of an air filter company. It wasn't mainly interesting, but in the very last paragraph, I came across a startling research statistic: "the air inside your car is 7 times more impure than the air outside." Wow, what a statistic! That type of information is of interest to us all but most of us have no idea that's the case.

What link builder value their salt couldn't make a great piece of link-worthy content around that? It's worth putting the time in to uncover gems like this.

2. Look for troublesome Companies in Your Industry and Learn From Them

A disruptive company is one that turns an recognized business model on its head and introduces some long overdue advance.

So find a disruptive force in your industry and look at what they're doing. What is unsettling about them? What issues do they focus on? What benefits do they offer? What stories do people write about them? What types of sites link to them and why?

Troublesome companies don't get much support or coverage from their own industry because of the threat they pose. And if they do get reporting, it's likely to be negative or, at best, skeptical.

SurveyMonkey is a upsetting influence on the market research industry because they cheer businesses to conduct their own research rather than use market research companies.

AirBnB.com is a disruptive influence on the travel manufacturing because they provide a source of accommodation that is outside the usual travel market.

Such troublesome companies have to be creative in getting out to other niches, and in establishing a presence and links from within these niches. So doing a link analysis of such sites will give you some extremely exciting niches and link prospects to explore.

Finding disrupting companies isn't that difficult. If your client can't provide them, do your own research. Opportunely the MIT Technology Review has published an brilliant resource, "50 Disruptive Companies of 2013" – they also have 50 companies from 2012, 2011, and so on.

3. Piggyback on flouting News Stories

Newsjacking, as David Merrman Scott calls it in his book of the same name, is about using breaking news to advance your own ends.

In the book he tells the tale of how Wynn Resorts newsjacked a story on the arrest of Paris Hilton by barring her from their properties. Wynn Resorts was then mentioned in nearly every story about the arrest.

As Scott says factually anyone can newsjack, "...if you are clever enough to add a new dimension to a story in real time, the news media will write about you."

And just last week the UK media was lively with the story of how Oprah Winfrey was refused the chance to buy an expensive handbag from a store in Switzerland. According to Lyndon Antcliff who runs a newsjacking alert service at CornwallSEO.com, this was a ideal story to be hijacked by a handbag retailer or producer (disclosure: I've worked with Lyndon on a number of projects). According to Antcliff, there are some great handbag stories out there to be curated with, "I was handbagged by Mrs Thatcher" on the BBC.

Summary

"Boring" is in the eye of the beholder. In any industry, no matter how boring on the surface, you can find and use opportunities for marvelous coverage and editorial links.