A process we use at our link-building agency to weed out junk websites(or super big websites that would definitely not give you a link) from a list of prospects is using this formula in google sheets. =ARRAYFORMULA(QUERY(A:A,”select * where not (“&TEXTJOIN(” or “,TRUE,”A contains ‘”&IMPORTDATA(“https://pastebin.com/raw/9K3zndkZ”)&”‘”)&”) label A’Filtered List’”))
Never use whois info to grab contact info. People often use personal email and dont like to be contacted at that address. I made this mistake and was labelled as a creep by a female blogger. I know girls can be a bit more paranoid than necessary but its better to avoid this. Invest in an outreach tool – When you will be doing outreach over a period time, inevitably you will reach out to some of the same blogger more than once. Without an outreach tool you won’t realize this and will keep introducing yourself in each new email which is kinda awkward. Don’t be over the top – I like to be cheesy but unfortunately humor does not convey very well via email. You humor can be termed as rudeness/creepiness by the recipient so its better to not be over the top. Being a little fun is fine though. Always validate your emails – If you are just starting out with outreach, you might not know that you need to verify the emails with a tool to make sure they really exist. Sending emails to invalid emails can affect your deliverability rate. Leverage the assets you already have – Linkbuilding is about providing value. Just because you wrote a personalized email to someone does not mean someone will link to you. Either you content needs to be ground breaking, if its not, people will either need money. If you dont have money, you can leverage the assets you already have. Like offering give away a free account of your tool or sharing their site to your social media following. Don’t give generic compliments – ” I am a huge fan of your work, I find your website to be really beneficial” People can sense fake compliments from a mile away. People hate being manipulated. if you dont have anything specific to say then dont say anything but dont give generic fake compliments. Always show your face – Bloggers receive dozens of outreach emails a day. Most with fake personas. So its better to show your face and build trust. Follow up or die – Like I said before, blogger receive dozens of outreach emails a day. They dont have time to respond to each. So you gotta follow up multiple times to get their attention. Dont write perfect emails – Having impeccable grammar, perfect capitalization all gives the feel of a marketing email. Make deliberate mistakes like extra spacing, missing capitalization etc to make it look natural. Dont be like everyone else in their inbox – Use a different font than the default font.
I know many people use Group Buys as I see many discussions asking about it. I was one of them till recently when I found out that even other users of the group buy can find your niches. I knew that the admins of the group buy were able to do that, but I had no idea that even other users can do it. Probably you think that you are saving some bucks, but actually, you don’t realize that you’re losing. -You make your niche more competitive, which means you have to spend more on backlinks. -You get much less income (even if you rank on the first page of Google) because you have to share with your new competitors. I just figured out that when I saw new competitors popping out to a golden niche that I have found. TL;DR: Don’t fucking dare to join group buys as in the long run you will spend more rather than saving.
For small SEO agencies, freelancers that don’t put a ton of energy into their own SEO (whether it’s too competitive or you rely on word-of-mouth), I highly recommend LinkedIn for lead gen. After optimizing my profile, I have been generating 3-5 leads from LinkedIn per week WITHOUT posting, and at a higher close rate than any other traffic source. I think this is an awesome platform because the organic reach seems to be better than on Facebook and it doesn’t require constant posting like on Instagram (though I highly recommend staying active for better results). There are also some pretty big players on the platform – I have landed some $10k+ SEO outreach gigs at major companies that you never see hanging out at Facebook or Instagram. Have you seen solid results from LinkedIn lead gen?
