How to find places to get backlinks

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.

• 
  Michael Martinez: You could try an RSS feed directory although I don`t know which ones are still active. There are quite a few RSS bots out there fetching feeds, and some of them report subscribers. You might try getting some ideas from your server log files. At the very least, those people reading the feeds are interested in your topics. As for structuring queries, I tend to use the negation operator on lots of marketing buzz expressions and just search for 1-3 topic-related terms. SEO bloggers and link builders have drowned out a lot of natural blogs. You could also try site searches on specific blogging platforms. And you could try using a search engine other than Google since most SEO bloggers focus on Google.
• 
  JL Faverio: Great points, thanks again Michael.
• 
  Michael Martinez: Just have to say this. I`m not a big believer in "backlink research". If you`re doing outreach for a high quality article, what you want is to find people who would be interested in sharing that article with their readers. People who have already linked to something possibly years ago may not even be updating their content any more, or they could be burned out on link requests from marketers. While most people would say "use Google`s date search", that just doesn`t work. It flat out ignores a lot of recently published content. I think if you spend some time browsing the RSS directories with active subscribers you`ll find blogs that are being updated with new content.
• 
  Michael Martinez: Also, PageRank is constantly redistributed and that means the PageRank earned by old links when they were first published diminishes over time. Getting links from old articles because they have some high SEO metric isn`t going to accomplish what you hope to accomplish unless you know for a fact that old content is still earning new links today. Go for the fresh stuff. Ignore the SEO metrics. And cultivate friendships with people who happily give you links again and again. Ignore all the nonsense about "1 link from a domain and move on". That`s just stupid.
• 
  JL Faverio: Michael Martinez good reminder, thanks again!
• 
  Michael Stricker: MyBlogGuest and other communities can be cultivated for relationships that will outlast a single link. BuzzSumo can identify Influential Authors and Publishers in keyword topics... and present Influencers with the largest, most active followings with regard to specified topics.
• 
  Benj Arriola: I mainly research people and not blogs. Then when I find the people, I figure out what blogs they publish in.
  
  There are many blogger outreach tools such as:
  
  Buzzstream
  Buzzsumo
  Pitchbox
  Grouphigh
  Cision Point
  
  And more!
  
  Search by keywords and related authors appear, and then you see their blogs, publications they write for, social media profiles and amount of followers.
• 
  Rishi Lakhani: Try twitter and Facebook searches to find socially active bloggers. LinkedIn and instagram may also be options.
  
  I had some decent success using Pinterest for a beauty site a year ago,
• 
  Michael Stricker: Rishi Lakhani nice! When you know what type of competent is favored on a platform, you can market there!