# Module 2.2: How to Grow Your List with Lookalike Prospects

Hey, it's Sam Oh and welcome to the second
lesson&nbsp;in the link prospecting module.
In this lesson, we're going to talk about
how to grow your list&nbsp;of prospects with
"lookalike prospects."
And the name "lookalike prospects" is
inspired by lookalike audiences which
is commonly used in online advertising.
Now, if you're unfamiliar with lookalike audiences,
ad platforms like Google and Facebook let you target
people who are similar to an&nbsp;existing audience.
For example, people that are&nbsp;like
your customers or website visitors.
And by targeting these lookalike audiences,
you're able to reach new people who are likely
to be interested in your business because
they share similar characteristics to your
existing customers or website visitors.
Now, lookalike prospects in link
building are very much the same.
You're trying to find people&nbsp;who are similar
to a seed prospect – which is&nbsp;something we
covered in the previous lesson.
But&nbsp;as a refresher, seed prospects are people
who&nbsp;link to a page for a specific reason.
And these specific reasons are what I call
"linkable points," which are usually identified
by patterns in a competing page's link profile.
Best of all, these linkable points
help us define our pitch angles.
Now, if this went over your head, then
I highly recommend watching lesson 2.1.
on finding seed prospects so you can
get&nbsp;the most value from this lesson.
Alright so there are 3 tools I use
to find lookalike prospects.
The first is Ahrefs.
More specifically, Ahrefs&nbsp;Site Explorer, Content
Explorer, SEO toolbar,&nbsp;and batch analysis.
The second tool is Google and&nbsp;the third
is the Scraper Chrome Extension.
With that said, let's go through some examples
of finding lookalike prospects based on a seed.
And we'll continue with the examples
we&nbsp;discussed in the previous lesson.
Alright, the first example is
for our SEO statistics page.
When we were creating this page, we analyzed
a competing page's anchors report in Ahrefs
Site Explorer.
And we noticed a pattern&nbsp;that the majority of
links to this page were because of a specific stat.
Now, when we went to visit these competing
pages,&nbsp;we noticed that a lot of the stats that
were in the anchors report weren't even on
the page or they were just super outdated.
So we&nbsp;had a couple pitch angles to run with.
Now, usually when you find these patterns
or&nbsp;linkable points in a competitor's backlink
profile, you'll likely want to get an&nbsp;understanding
of the breadth of the opportunity.&nbsp;&nbsp;
And this will help you gauge whether it'll
be&nbsp;worth your time and effort to pursue it.
The easiest way to do that is to look
for a&nbsp;footprint within the pattern.
And a footprint is just a common
mark among a dataset.
So in this case, the footprint
would be the percent sign.
Now, with footprint in hand, we can
go to the backlinks report and use
the filters&nbsp;to narrow in on
relevant opportunities.
And because our footprint is a percent sign in
the&nbsp;anchor or surrounding text of the backlink,
I'll type that into the search box and
choose anchors&nbsp;with surrounding text
as the search mode.
And as you can see, there are around 1,800&nbsp;
pages from unique websites that link to this
page because of a specific stat.
That's a&nbsp;pretty nice opportunity in my opinion.
Now, we didn't stop here.
We also looked&nbsp;at other anchors profiles for
other top ranking pages that had a significant
number of referring domains.
And we basically just&nbsp;did the exact same
thing and found well over 3,000 lookalike
prospects to our seed.
Alright the next example was when we found
an&nbsp;opportunity for our link building guide.
What we noticed was that a competing page
was&nbsp;getting backlinks because they used to
have a downloadable ebook in their link building guide.
And like the previous example, there was no CTA
or&nbsp;mention of a downloadable ebook on the page.
Now, the pattern I noticed is that all of
the&nbsp;referring pages are on the topic of
"top seo ebooks."
So that means our&nbsp;seed prospects are people
who have a&nbsp;listicle on the top SEO ebooks.
So what we need to search for are titles of
pages that include the word "best or top,"
which implies a listicle and "seo ebooks,"
which implies the main topic.
So to find our lookalike prospects, we can use
Google search or Ahrefs' Content Explorer.
In Google search, you can type in something
like&nbsp;intitle:best intitle:seo intitle:ebook.
And we're left with a few hundred results.
Now, you can enable Ahrefs' SEO toolbar to get
both domain and page level metrics on the results.
And if you prefer to work in Excel or Sheets,
you can export the SERP as needed.
But this job is much easier if you
use Ahrefs'&nbsp;Content Explorer.
So I'll search for "best OR&nbsp;top" within
parentheses, and then SEO ebook.&nbsp;&nbsp;
Finally, I'll change the search
mode&nbsp;to Title and run the search.
And now you can see a few hundred
results along with their SEO metrics.
And this report is also filterable
and exportable too.
Now, if you want to further expand your
list of lookalike prospects, you can simply
change the word "SEO" to something like
marketing since link building is a smaller
part of the broader marketing category.
And now we have well over 1,000
prospects&nbsp;in total for this campaign.
Alright, the final seed we talked&nbsp;about
was for our page that debunks&nbsp;myths
behind so-called "LSI keywords."
Now, we established that our seed prospect is
any page that recommends using LSI keywords,
because&nbsp;there's no such
thing as LSI keywords.
And while there were a few hundred prospects
in the link profile we looked at in lesson 2.1,
we can easily find a bigger list of lookalike
prospects using Content Explorer.
So this time, I'm going to search for "use&nbsp;LSI
keywords" as a phrase match, which should
surface pages where authors are recommending
visitors to use so-called LSI keywords.
And now we have thousands of prospects
who've&nbsp;said this phrase on their page.
So it would just be a matter of vetting these
pages and&nbsp;we'll get into this in the next module.
Now, these are just a few methods that I
would use to find lookalike prospects for
these hypothetical campaigns.
And while there&nbsp;are other ways to generate
similar results,&nbsp;I won't bother going into them
because the most&nbsp;important part
of this exercise is to understand
how seed prospects help to broaden the scope&nbsp;
of your campaign with lookalike prospects.
Now, there's one more technique to finding
lookalike prospects I want to talk about.
And it's not so much about&nbsp;finding them
necessarily,&nbsp;&nbsp;but it's an efficient technique
that I find myself using pretty frequently.
And that's scraping.
There are going to be times&nbsp;when
you're browsing the web and you
notice a potential seed that's worth exploring.
For example, I was looking for ways to build links
to our SEO course landing page in Ahrefs Academy.
And I went through the usual routine of analyzing
the backlink profiles of competing pages.
Now, this was all well and good, but then
I&nbsp;happened to find another low-hanging
opportunity that none of our organic
search&nbsp;competitors would be able to do.
And I discovered it in YouTube analytics.
I realized that our SEO course videos had
gotten&nbsp;over a million views in less than a year.
So I was like… man… I'm sure someone has
linked to&nbsp;these videos or embedded it in their
posts at some point.
Meaning, these are warm prospects who
I could reach out to and ask to link to our
academy instead.
Basically, my idea followed a similar&nbsp;concept
to unlinked mentions, which usually has a pretty
high conversion rate for us.
So I ran the video URL in Ahrefs' Site Explorer,
and sure enough, this video had collected a ton
of referring domains.
And I also checked the embed URL
for this same video in Site Explorer.
And there were even more referring
domains to sort through.
So our seed prospect for this hypothetical&nbsp;
campaign is anyone linking to one of our
SEO course videos on our YouTube channel.
Or anyone&nbsp;that's embedded the video on their page.
Now, because there's a total of 15 videos
of this course on our YouTube channel,
I needed to get all of the URLs so I can run
them through a tool like Ahrefs' Batch Analysis.
And to do that, I used
the&nbsp;Chrome Scraper Extension.
All you need to do is right click on
the information you want to scrape
and click "Scrape similar."
From here, I modified the Xpath code a bit
and within seconds, we had a full list of
URLs ready to batch analyze.
Finally, I ran the URLs&nbsp;through Ahrefs' Batch
Analysis,&nbsp;sorted by Referring Domains, and I
could instantly&nbsp;see that we had
a huge list of lookalike prospects
that might be willing to
link to our academy page.
As you can see, finding lookalike prospects is
all about finding a footprint within your seed
and following the rabbit hole.
And when you have&nbsp;a general scope of
the breadth of the campaign,&nbsp;you're able
to get an idea if actually running the&nbsp;campaign
will be worth your time and effort.
Now, when you're dealing with thousands of
potential link prospects with multiple seeds,
it can get quite messy.
Plus, sending&nbsp;personalized emails at scale is tough.
And that's where segmenting your link
prospects is going to help you stay organized,
convert more emails into links
and save you a ton of time.
So in the next lesson, we're going to talk
about how you can effectively segment
your prospects so you can scale
personalized&nbsp;outreach campaigns.
I'll see you there.