Right, so you’ve gotta to build links. Checklist time — obscure niche (check), client with unrealistically high expectations (check), client with little or no input or assistance (check), competing against spammers and article spinners who are winning the SERPs (check), and armed only coffee and an Excel spreadsheet (check). Let’s build links.
End of link building for client, day one. So you’ve sent out 50 emails to a bunch of different websites, telling them about how cool your client is, how ‘we have this great resource that would be of real interest to your readers’, how it would be great to ‘work with you on this’, all that good stuff. You’ve had three emails back – one undeliverable, one asking you to ‘remove us from your mailing list’ (ouch, that hurts), and one informing you that you can buy a sidebar link from them for $100 per month. Great start.
I’m hoping that this sounds familiar to some of you, and that the following tips can help you improve your outreach, and stop your work ending up in the trash (or bin. Bin-bound. You see what I did there, right?). Email outreach is tricky business, but I find that starting my work with just a few simple questions can really help shape my work and keep me bang on track.
Who am I targeting for your outreach?
Why am I targeting them?
What value am I offering them?
Would I answer that email?
Chances are that if you’ve struggled to answer those questions, then you might need to re-think your whole link building strategy. If that test was easy, congratulations, you can ‘Pass Go’ and collect £200.
I’ve assembled some (hopefully useful) tips on how to improve your outreach work. How have I assembled such a list? Through doing it wrong, from learning by my mistakes, and from hearing the experiences of smart folks in the industry. Here’s a few things that have worked for me in the past (please do chip in with comments below!):
Preparation.
Setup an email address on behalf of your client ([email protected]). This one is so easy (or it should be, if your clients know what’s good for them!). Ask yourself what sounds better; an unsolicited link request email coming from a ‘marketing’ company, or a ‘reaching out’ enquiry coming directly from a real company team member. That one has probably doubled the Screaming Frog productivity over the last six months.
Pick your target wisely.
If you’re contacting someone about a guest post, naturally you’ll want to speak to an editorial contact, but it’s not always as simple as that. For larger blogs, magazines or newspapers, you’ll often be faced with an intimidating list of names and job titles, and it’s important that you make your approach to the right person. For my first attempt at outreach, I like to pick someone relatively junior in rank, but also someone who’s not just an intern with no editorial pull (Journalisted is a great resource for this). A Director or Managing Editor is likely to have a ton of BS emails to churn through, so don’t add yours to their pile. An ‘Assistant News Editor’ who will probably be flattered to receive your enquiry or guest blog post, is ideal. Bonus tip – DO NOT CC every email address you can find on the contact page. They can see that. And they most likely work right next to each other.
Who? What? Why?
Once you have an email address, think hard about who is receiving this email. Always, always, always try and find a name, find out who this person is, what’s their job role, what’s the content of their most recent couple of blog posts etc. As Wil Reynolds might say, stalk them. How do you do that? I like to get tooled up when I’m putting together a link building strategy. Here are a few of my personal faves:
- Follower Wonk – search for your keywords in Twitter profiles to find key influencers in your vertical.
- Rapportive – awesome plugin for Gmail that pulls in social profiles, names, website links to the person you’re email. Easy way to see what they’ve been tweeting about recently, use this to your advantage when composing your email! Rob Ousbey of Distilled did you a great break down post on this not long ago, check it out.
- Topsy – a little like Follower Wonk, except you can search all social media and recent blog posts that have been published. Find out who is ALREADY talking within your niche, and offer them extra insight and opinion.
- Boomerang – another great Gmail plugin that allows you to schedule emails and follow up emails that don’t receive a response. Also use Gmail’s own canned responses feature to speed up your outreach work.
- GroupHigh – I’ve read some good things about this bad boy and am going to try the demo, it looks like it does a lot of the leg work for you – I’ll keep you posted!
“Man, this webmaster is doing EVERYTHING in their power to not be contacted.” Occasionally you’ll get one of these. If you’re lucky then you’ll find an empty ‘Contact Us’ enquiry form staring back at you, but if not, then be persistent. Use resources like WhoIs, find the editor’s Twitter profile to get @ them, check out the ‘About’ page to find a name, then Google it, find their other blogs or LinkedIn profile – whatever it takes. I never like to be defeated! Bonus tip – if you’re struggling to find any contact details, check out the Privacy Policy/Terms and Conditions pages, and also try a site query (site:domain.com contact/email me). Look EVERYWHERE.
Get the conversation going. If you don’t have a name and are unsure of exactly who is responsible for editing the page or blog you’re targeting, fear not. Use the contact form or general email address, and just ask. “I’m trying to get in touch with the person who looks after your Travel section, would you be able to point me in the right direction?”. It’s someone’s JOB to deal with these kinds of enquiries, let them help you.
Email Content.
So you’ve now put together a good list of targets for your outreach. You have names, email addresses, DOB’s, what these folks had for breakfast, etc. The content of the email comes next, and this is just as an important step. Mike King and iAcquire did some great work examining a whole ton of outreach emails to get a handle on the kind of things that work and that don’t work. Mike found some really interesting things like the response rate from emails with a phone number in the signature, for instance. Check out Mike’s deck from LinkLove this year for more details.
These are no hard and fast rules to the perfect content of an outreach email, but here are a couple of tips that have worked well for me:
Length: No essays, but get your point across. Tell the recipient who you are, why your contacting them and what you’d like them to do next. That first contact email is the crucial one, you have to get that conversation moving, so don’t bore them to death, but don’t forget to include the reason you’re emailing them!
Links: Don’t mention the word links. In fact, I wouldn’t even ask for a link (or as I would put it, a ‘citation’, ‘reference’ or ‘inclusion’) on the first email. Stay well away. Get the dialogue moving to lull them into a false sense of security, then BAM, ask for that elusive link.
Hyperlinks: A while back I ran a test by removing all hyperlinks from email outreach, to see if emails with hyperlinks were in certain instances, triggering spam/trash filters (thus making your email, Bin-bound. Ahem). Since then, I’ve had a better response rate. I’ve not quantified it yet (although I should) but I can tell you it’s worked.
Male/Female: Agency folks reading this will have probably had the kind of conversations surrounding ‘should we setup a persona? I’ve heard that females get a better response rate through outreach than males.’ – I know that, because I’ve had those discussions myself and tried it. From my experience, the content, approach and strategy are what really matter, not your sex.
Ego bait: Without being overly ass-kissy, be nice, be friendly and compliment the recipient on something. “We’re big fans of the blog” or “I read you recent post on eco-friendly energy sources and it was fantastic” etc. Don’t be false, you’ll have to do some work and you should do some work. Bonus tip: ask them to review or give feedback on something “as you’re clearly an authority in the financial industry” etc.
Hook: How can you hook them in? What’s unique about your email compared to the 50 other they’ve received that day? Personalise and be honest, show off what’s good about your client or company.
Help: Whether you’re planning to provide the recipient with content, a study, if you’re pointing out a broken link, or you just feel that they can’t possible live without your wonderful website link, remember you need to be providing them with help and value.
End with a question: They’ve read your email now, but just give them that extra nudge that they need to get back to you. Even something as simple as ‘How does that sound?’ or ‘Have I missed anything?’ will encourage a better response rate, and once you have your foot in the door, you’ll stand a much better chance of building a link.
Here are a couple of good/bad examples, see if you can spot which is which:
Dear Webmaster,
Congratulations on your excellent resource website. I love reading your
Hey Steve,
I hope all is well. I wanted to reach out regarding your excellent web design blog – I read your recent post on where to find the best vectors and themes for Wordpress sites, which really helped me out for my own personal blog. Thanks! I also work for a hosting site and we’ve just put together this awesome 10 step guide about how to set up a Wordpress site, get GA and WMT going, the whole setup. We think it would be of really useful for web design beginners and could be of interest to your readers, would you be interested in taking a look? I look forward to hearing from you!
Okay, so I hope that everyone reading this knows that example one is most definitely not the way to go, and I hope you get the gist of my tips above. Be friendly, personable, humble and helpful. If you can do this then your outreach response rate (and link rate!) will improve significantly. I’m learning more and more about SEO and link building every day and I’m constantly looking for ways to streamline my work, and these steps have helped improve my success rate to no end. Do your outreach right, and you won’t ever have to worry about anything like this:
Your comments and own experiences are very welcome guys, and I hope that my tips will help with your future outreach work.
