What is Engage Finder?

EngageFinder.com is both the culmination of an eight-year digital marketing journey I’ve been on and the start of a new journey into data-driven marketing automation.

It is a secure online marketing platform that focuses on isolating completely new referring sites (e.g. website domains that have never referred traffic to your site ever before) that are likely ready and willing to engage with you in a manner that will maximize your social media and SEO return on investment (e.g. they obviously gave you an unsolicited inbound link so they are likely to mention and/or link to you again in the future).

The toolset is uique in that:

1. It’s not simply identifying referring link data the way Google Analytics, Google Alerts, or various existing tools currently do. Instead, it’s constantly gathering your referring site data and then building out a progressively larger and larger database of historical referring domains, then it automatically bumps this data against the new batch of daily, weekly, or monthly referring domain data to sift out completely new referrers (e.g. ones that aren’t in that aforementioned historical database).
2. It has a user-friendly reporting dashboard that’s accessible online and provides your new referring site data alongside several key metrics such as whether or not the referring link is “do follow”, whether or not the referring URL is indexed by Google, how many visits (or conversions) were referred by the referring URL.
3. It has an automated alert feature that allows you to receive an email alert each and every time that there is a new referring site identified by Engage Finder.

This final point is in important one, because the automated alert system essentially allows you to take tactic that used to take hours of human labor (and that very few companies – large or small – engage in due to its tedious and data-intensive nature) and essentially automate it. And all for as little as $5 a month.

That means that if the tool identifies just one viable link-building partner or social media influencer per month it will have paid for itself and then some.

Where in the heck did I come up with such a zany idea? Well, the technique first occurred to me back in 2004, as poured through referring site data on an almost daily basis to fish for viable new link building partners and social media influencers (granted, we didn’t have the word “social media” back then, but the idea was more or less the same and just as effective back then).

I quickly realized that managing the process manually was simply too time consuming, but on the flipside, not monitoring the data led to all sorts of missed opportunities falling through the cracks. So I did what any self-respecting online marketer would do. I busted out Excel and started to play around with ways to structure the data and compare it to new batches of data in order to identify new referrers in a more automated and scalable manner. That worked fairly well for me, but as my career progressed and I became responsible for managing teams of digital marketers it quickly became apparent that counting on every individual marketer to go through this process on a steady and ongoing basis was little more than a pipe dream.

That’s when I realized that I needed a true application that could automate both the process of identifying the key data I was looking for as well as alerting me automatically so that I didn’t have to spend time doing so. I took years of work and I needed a lot of help, but the end result is www.engagefinder.com.

I’ve had some key industry colleagues test the tool to make sure that it delivered true business value, and after carefully detailing their feedback, I feel confident that this is a tool that’s ready public consumption.

And I’m so confident that the tool will prove its own value over time that I’m willing to give the first month away for free so that you can take it for a spin.

Mind you, this platform in its current manifestation is not for you if:

• You’re completely new to digital marketing and/or have a completely new website. This tool requires an existing stream of referring site traffic in order to provide measurable business value.
• Your site uses an analytics platform other than Google Analytics. While I do hope to someday offer this tool to companies that use other analytics platforms like Omniture/Adobe or Coremetrics, the current iteration does not have this functionality.