Most people get link-building outreach totally wrong and tend to waste a lot of time, money, and backlinks in the process.
Don’t fall into this trap!
If you want to get ahead of your competitors in link building, narrow your outreach campaign like a pro with some of the best link-building outreach hacks.
Here are my top 14 advanced link-building outreach tips for cold email outreach.
Table of Contents
Tip #1: Outreach Like A Human
If you’re reaching out to webmasters, don’t hit them with the hard sale by explaining why your website is better than everyone else’s.
Just be conversational, offer value, and try not to be too aggressive in your approach.
If you follow this tip, you’ll set yourself apart from 90% of the outreach emails that you’re competing with.
Tip #2: Add Humor
As simple as it sounds, adding humor to your outreach campaign also works extremely well. Add puns in your copy, throw in some jokes, and keep it lighthearted and informal while making sure it’s all relevant to your content.
90% of outreach emails are really badly written, to the point where it’s actually ridiculous. When you add a bit of humor, you’re building a bit of rapport. You’re also differentiating your content and adding a bit more value to your campaign.
Tip # 3: Scale Up
If you want to build a lot of links with cold email outreach, you need to outreach at scale. And that’s the beauty of the skyscraper technique.
In most of my successful link-building campaigns, I contact 1,000 or more prospects about my content, and a decent percentage of these will convert into links.
Tip #4: Be Persistent
First of all, you should never ever spam anyone.
Second, always offer value in your emails. To do this, you need to be very persistent.
Set up an automated outreach sequence to follow up your prospects one to two times after your first email. If someone doesn’t get back to you, don’t take it personally.
Quite often, webmasters will reply three weeks later. In fact, sometimes they’ll be pretty rude about it too, which is part of the job. Nevertheless, it’s important to follow up and make sure that you’re not forgotten.
You can also use the snooze feature on G Suite (now Google Workspace) to bounce your email back into your inbox several days later, so that you don’t forget to get back to anyone.
Tip #5: Make Your Outreach Emails Win-Win
Always think about what’s in it for the webmaster and why they should bother spending their valuable time adding a link to your website. The stronger your incentive, the more links you’ll get back.
You can also offer a social media share to thank them for the links you get in your email newsletter. Basically, the more value you offer, the more likely that the webmaster will take you up on the offer.
If you want to build a long-term relationship with a site owner, then you have to make it a win-win partnership.
Tip #6: Avoid Outreach Templates
If you search Google for outreach templates, you’re going to be overwhelmed with choices. The other problem is that everyone’s using these templates. In fact, you’ll struggle to avoid the spam filter with these kinds of templates.
Focus on writing an email outreach campaign that’s unique and original. There are few reasons why this is important:
- Webmasters can spot a template very easily.
- If the template has already been used thousands of times, there’s a good chance that spam filters will pick it up, block your email, and send it to your prospect’s spam mailbox (more on this in the next tip).
- You need to make your copy original and customized according to the theme of the content you’re trying to build links for.
Tip #7: Avoid Spam Filters
When you’re doing cold email outreach with your link-building, you need to be really careful about spam filters. They’re designed to pick up certain keywords like “free”, “bro”, “offer”, and others that could hurt your email deliverability.
In addition, if you keep hitting the spam filter, the domain you send your emails from will get burned out very quickly. So just stick to plain text emails, and avoid sending images in your campaign.
Tip #8: Manage Your Inbox Productively
If you’re ever sending out hundreds of outreach emails per day, your inbox will fill up really quickly and you will have to spend hours just managing these inboxes.
Instead, here’s what you can do:
- Check your emails just once per day.
- Remove email notifications from your phone.
- Keep a bank of canned responses so that you can reply to messages right away which you can set up in your email settings.
Also, if you’re trying to scale up and build links with multiple inboxes, use software like Shift that allows you to manage all of your inboxes in one place.
You can also train a virtual assistant to manage your inboxes depending on how many you have. In my client base, for example, I have over 60 email inboxes, so I have a team that were personally trained to manage my emails more effectively
Tip #9: Use Tools To Find Emails Quickly
Obviously, if you’re doing link building outreach, you need to find each of your prospects’ email addresses.
Once you’re trying to scale up, it’s important to find a quicker way of doing this, because manually hunting for emails takes hours of research.
There are websites like “hunter.io” that can find emails in bulk. All you have to do is simply copy and paste large lists of your URLs on there.
Tip #10: Optimize Your Copywriting
You should be writing the actual outreach email yourself because it’s really important to get that part right.
Keep it short, conversational, and value-driven for the reader. Remember that better outreach copy equals more links and conversion. In fact, a well-written outreach email funnel can land you hundreds of links.
Tip #11: Optimize Your DNS Records
When it comes to cold email, a tiny tweak in email deliverability will make a huge difference in your results.
There are certain tricks of the trade to do this. For example, you can add the DKIM, DMARC, and SPF records for your URL’s DNS records. If you’re using outreach softwares like Mailchimp, there are custom tracking servers too.
All of these tiny technical tweaks add up to a huge increase in your emails’ overall deliverability.
Tip #12: Set Up A Separate Domain For Your Email Address
When you’re doing cold email outreach, don’t use your website’s main domain. Otherwise, you’ll destroy your domain’s deliverability in the long run because cold email outreach can hurt your domain’s sending reputation.
It’s basically collateral damage. Instead, you can buy separate URLs for a few dollars.
Tip #13: Stop Using Gmail For Outreach.
If you’re thinking of using Gmail for link-building outreach, don’t do it. It will look unprofessional and eventually get your account blocked.
It’s way better to use a G Suite email address, because of its higher deliverability rate.
When you send emails from a real domain, you’re less likely to get your account blocked, because you look more legit. G Suite only costs about $6 a month, so it’s definitely worth it.
Tip #14: Warm Up Your Campaign Slowly.
Finally, if you’re using a brand new email account, don’t start blasting out 200 emails a day, no matter how much of a rush you’re in. It’s better to start slowly by warming up your account with a few emails per day.
You can increase the number of emails you send per day by five every week. For example, send five emails a day for week one. Then, send 10 emails a day for week two. And so on.
This gradual process will warm up your account so that it’ll be less likely to be marked as spam by email service providers.
These are some of the main ways to help you bring up your link-building outreach game and improve your results. If you follow these tips, then you will surely stand out in the sea of badly-written and poorly-setup outreach campaigns.
