Everyone knows how to find websites within their niche but when it comes to contacting them for a link they often get it wrong. Link builders in general seem to forget that links reflect online relationships and very few people will respond to an email looking as if you’re asking for a one night stand – anyone that does is a link wh*re and possibly somewhere you wouldn’t want a link in the first place.
First Contact
When contacting someone for a link, make sure you get their information correct, make it personalised to them, some tips on how to do this are:
- Include their website URI within the subject and their name within the greeting – this makes the email look less like spam and more personal.
- Look through their website and include anything you liked within the email – webmasters love compliments and the more you give the better, giving specific details to once again make the email more personalised to them.
- Don’t ask for a link in the first email, instead start a conversation and save the request until further down the line – this will help you establish what USP you can use to gain the link.
Time Saving Techniques
Sending personalised emails is something that can take up a fair chunk of your time and can limit the amount of people you can contact per day – so how do we automate this?
- Create a list of websites within an Excel document that lists the following information
- The website URI
- The webmaster’s name
- The thing(s) you like about his website
- Create a template email leaving room for the above information
- Create an Excel script to bulk email
The Second Date
Because you are providing personalised information within your email template it looks less like spam, you are more likely to get a response and you are more likely to get a link – sadly after the first email there is no way to reply in bulk but you won’t be sending as many emails this time because only those interested in you will reply.
Use the second email to give the webmaster some tips on how to improve his website, tell him you’re now following him on Twitter and Facebook. If he owns a blog start commenting on there – these are all great things that reinforce that you are someone he/she should trust and will pave the way to gaining a link – the light is at the end of the tunnel.
Time to “Put Out”
As everyone not from Falkirk knows the 3rd date is usually where you get lucky. You will know quite a bit about them from following their Twitter feed and Facebook shares, they know who you are and trust you because of the advice you gave and previous interactions leading up to this so now you can freely drop into the conversation the fact that you have that piece of great content or that killer product on your website that you thought they may be interested in.
If you word your email correctly there is a great chance that you will complete your goal and get that nice juicy link back to your website, just remember that no tactic has a 100% success rate and may take further dates to get the job done.
Email Fail
Since I have a few websites up and running I regularly receive requests for links I thought it would be fun to share a few templates that maybe you shouldn’t copy:
Special thanks to Ben for the proof reading and grammar checks.
Darned good advice. Thanks for it.
VERY insightful, Scott. My team and I are still working on the "perfect" email pitch and this will help us a lot. When you are doing outreach email, are you reaching out as yourself or are you reaching out as an alias from the client's domain? I have found some success with both, but nothing conclusive.
Thanks for posting!
-Napoleon
Hey Napoleon
Thanks for your comment.
If you are emailing from a clients domain then it can be easier as it seems more genuine to a webmaster, but I dont think it impacts the reply / success rate of the email pitch too much – it just saves time not having to convince the webmaster who you are.
I hope that answers your question
Paddy Moogan from Distilled did a study on this that he shared at the linkbuilding conference, when asked a question about this topic. He said that according to the research he and his team did, mailing from a non-client domain did not really hurt open or conversion rates. I found that interesting, but still prefer to go from the client domain (if you can access it easily to send emails.)
Hi John,
Paddy put together a good presentation @ the conference – at the end of the day the major factor is the email content – if its spammy then your success rate will always be lower
Hi Scott,
I like the "treat it like a date" metaphor. Similar to dating I tend to find the first date link partners as you would call them are generally low quality (fat chicks) but the ones that take a little bit more work are the supermodels……….so to speak lol.
Cheers Again Mate.
Hi Ross,
Glad you liked the post – I defo agree with you over lower quality vs higher quality and the process will follow slightly different paths for each
– my post was aimed more at emailing for those higher value "supermodel" links 
Nice post Scott,
One question. After you've "scored" and your date is linking back to you, and you do the same process again and again, you become a player – let's say you now have 20 links from 20 sites using the same method. Do you just stop communicating with them after you've got the link? Or do you continue to act in the same way/similar behaviour as you were prior to establishing their link (ie emailing them, commenting on their content, Tweeting them etc)? Because I'm thinking this may start to become monotonous at some point and in the end too much work (let's say you get up to 50 links now (competitive industry) – that's 50 emails, 50 articles to read and comment on, 250+ Tweets)…
Hey Barry,
Glad you liked the post
After you have "scored" you also have the opportunity to ask if they have any friends / colleagues that might be interested. You can also continue to drop comments over time and do a few RT's – it depends how much spare time you have
and yes the end result is that you could become a "player" but that's better than being a pimp