Content-Based Link Building

Content-based link building is becoming ever more popular amongst SEOs for a number of reasons, even though it can be one of the tougher approaches to carry out successfully. The basic process looks something like this:

Some of these you’ve already learned about in the chapter on building a link building campaign, so we’ll try not to repeat ourselves here. The basic premise is that you create an asset which you use to try and get links. This takes the form of a piece of content and can include something like:

An infographic• A data visualization• A white paper• A how-to guide• A video• An image gallery

You create these assets with a view to earning links to them from people who find them relevant, interesting, funny, informative, etc. You then reach out to these people in an attempt to actually build those links. Over time, you aim to reach a point at which you don’t need to ask for each and every link that you receive. Instead, you should be able to seed the content with a few key influencers in your community who can help spread the word on your behalf. This can take a long time to achieve and requires a lot of investment in exceptional content, but it is certainly possible.

Examples of Content-Based Link Building Campaigns

In this section, we will look at some examples of successful link building campaigns along with some analysis of what made them successful. One thing to note here is that the primary goal of the following examples may not have been links, but they were very successful, nonetheless, so there is something we can learn.

The Ultimate Guide to Worldwide EtiquetteThis is a small interactive piece of content that is not only nicely designed, but genuinely useful. It helps users understand the different expectations in different areas of the world when it comes to culture and etiquette.http://www.swissotel.com/promo/etiquette-map/This page currently has 68 linking root domains and a Page Authority of 63.

What made it successful?• It works very well and is easy to use; you simply choose your country and the content changes instantly• The design is very clean which means you understand what it does straight away• It is relevant to the type of people who would visit a hotel booking website• The content is genuinely useful to people because not knowing a local culture or etiquette is a common problem

100 Years of Rock Music VisualizedThis is another interactive piece of content which shows the different genres of rock music that have developed in the last 100 years.http://www.concerthotels.com/100-years-of-rockThe page currently has 198 linking root domains and a Page Authority of 53. Let’s look at why it attracted links:

The interactivity really adds to the content; it engages the user straight away & keeps them on the page• You can interactive with the piece and listen to samples of music• It applies to a large number of people (rock music fans)• It is in line with people who would use a hotel booking site focused on music venues

You vs. John PaulsonThis was a very smart idea by an SEO in the UK. It is an interactive piece of content that allows you to compare your annual salary with that of John Paulson who is a very successful forex trader.https://mahifx.com/john-paulson/It used to be hosted on the homepage and was used as a link building technique to get links to the homepage prior to the service being launched. Before it was moved, the content had over 200 linking domains. What made it successful?

It’s interactive but very simple to use; it only asks you for one piece of info (your salary)• It is very engaging; it keeps you scrolling down the page to find out more• The sheer scale of how much money John Paulson makes is hard for most of us to comprehend• It is very shareable as it is relevant to pretty much anyone, not just forex traders

18 Startup Founders Share Their Lowest PointsThis is a bit different to the previous pieces of content and mainly consists of written, rather than visual, content. It is a series of stories from startup founders who share their lowest points before become big successes.http://www.attendly.com/stories-of-failure-and-redemption-18-startup-founders-share-their-lowest-moments-before-coming-out-on-top/This page currently has 21 linking root domains and a Page Authority of 36. Let’s take a look at what made this happen:•It’s interactive but very simple to use; it only asks you for one piece of info (your salary)• It is very engaging; it keeps you scrolling down the page to find out more• The sheer scale of how much money John Paulson makes is hard for most of us to comprehend• It is very shareable as it is relevant to pretty much anyone, not just forex traders•It is different; interviews are usually about high points and successes but this was the opposite, so it can provoke people’s attention• The interviewees and their companies are very well known within their fields, so they probably have large social followings• This content can appeal to a wide range of people who are active online, therefore increasing the chances of getting links and social shares

Advanced Search Queries

There are a number of ways to search Google that are not immediately obvious to us as users. We are accustomed to searching for strings of keywords and this is how 99% of Google users search too. But, there is a set of search tools available to us that can make our results a lot more focused and specific to what we need. For link building, this means we can filter out websites that may not be useful for us and spend our time looking through ones that are. Here are a few examples using different advanced searches:

Notice the “inurl:resources” bit? This tells Google to only show results that have the word “resources” within the URL. Here is an example of one result that Google gives us:

http://cupcake-underground.blogspot.com/p/resources.html

This is a good potential link target, because your definitive guide to cupcakes is a resource that could be of interest to visitors to a cupcake blog. Therefore, contacting the owner of this blog and asking them to list your guide as a resource could result in a link for you.

Let’s take a look at another example:

We have combined two advanced searches here. First, we used the “intitle:resources” modifier, which tells Google to only show results that have the word “resources” within the page title. This is useful because sometimes the word may not be used in the URL, so our previous advanced search (with inurl:) would not find them.We have also used quotation marks around the word cupcakes. This tells Google to only return results that mention cupcakes on the page. This is useful in this case because searching for “food blogger” would probably be a bit too broad and we’d have to dig through a lot of websites that may not be relevant to the topic of cupcakes.Now you have three solid methods for finding relevant link targets and, at this point, you will probably have a nice big list of them in a spreadsheet. But, we need to do a bit more work before contacting the site owners.

Finding Out More About the Personas We’re TargetingIf you want to have a high response rate with your outreach, you need to spend a bit of time making sure that the websites you’ve found are as relevant as possible. food blogger “cupcakes” intitle:resourcesYou can do this by spending time learning about your target bloggers, Visit their websites, read through their content, try to get a feel for what they like and what they don’t like. Take a look through their social networks, such as Twitter, to see what links they have shared recently.In particular, pay close attention to whether or not they share other people’s content or if they only promote their own. Ideally, you want to find some evidence of them sharing external resources, because that’s what you’ll be asking them to do.As you go through each website, make some notes about what they’ve shared and what interests them. This is crucial because you’ll need this information later when you contact them. Otherwise, you’ll just be sending them a generic, templated email that won’t be personalized to them at all.A nice little trick you can use here is to put the blog’s URL into a tool like Tagcrowdwhich will analyze the content of the page and show you which words are mentioned the most.

Finding Contact DetailsOnce you’ve decided that the blog is within your target audience and seems relevant, you’ll need to find contact details. This is usually pretty straightforward, but here are a few tips that may speed things up a little.

Check the Header and Footer FirstMost of the time, you will find a link to a contact page in the header or the footer of a website, so check these areas first. If you can’t see a contact page, try an “about” page which often list contact details.

Install ToutApp For Google ChromeToutApp is a small Google Chrome plug-in that will actively try and find an email addresses on a page for you. When it has found one, it will be highlighted in your Chrome toolbar and you can click on it to find the email address.

Prioritizing Link TargetsBy this point, you probably have a big list of link targets, and you need to prioritize them and group them into buckets so that you can customize your message to them with greatest efficiency.

There are a few ways to prioritize link targets for outreach:

By domain metrics, i.e., PageRank, Domain Authority•By blogger influence, i.e., number of Twitter followers•By the likelihood of linking, i.e., a cupcake blogger vs. a generic food blogger

Domain Metrics

For now, all you need to know is that these metrics can measure the value of link targets just as well as they can measure the value of individual links.There are two main domain metrics to use when filtering and sorting your link targets: PageRank and Domain Authority. You could, of course, gather the domain metrics for each website one by one, but that would take far more time; there are tools available that let you gather the data in bulk.You can get the PageRank for your targets using Excel and the SEO Tools for Excel plug-in.You can also get Domain Authority into your Excel spreadsheet by using the Links API plug-in by SEO gadget.

Once you have these metrics, you can do a simple sort in Excel from highest to lowest and, if you choose, you can remove link targets that do not have high enough domain metrics. This particularly helps if you have a very large set of websites and you don’t feel that you have the time to contact them all. I tend to sort by PageRank first and get rid of anything that is below a score of 1. If I have a very large set of results, I may also get rid of anything below a score of 2.

I then sort by Domain Authority and will generally get rid of anything below DA30 or DA35, if I have a very big list. This isn’t an exact science, however, because a new website that may be very good and relevant may not have accumulated enough PageRank or Domain Authority yet. However, if you have a large list of potential link targets, you do want to be quite aggressive in narrowing it down so that you have a good quality set of remaining websites to work with.

Identifying Your Target Audience for Links

Once you have your idea mapped out, it shouldn’t be too hard to find out who will fall within your target audience. Generally, you just need to brainstorm subjects related to your content. Let’s take a look at an example.Imagine you are putting together a piece of content entitled, The Definitive Guide to Baking the Perfect Cupcakes. You are producing this content because you own a local bakery which sells cupcakes as well as lots of other lovely things.

Who would be interested in this guide?Food bloggers: the obvious choice!Parent bloggers: they may want to teach their kids how to make cupcakes and your guide will show them how to do thisRecipe websites: because your guide will contain lots of great recipes for different types of cupcakesParty websites: no party is complete without a plate of cupcakes

With just a minute or two of thinking, we’ve easily come up with four types of websites that may be interested in our cupcake guide. Now we can start researching these in more detail to get a better idea of whether or not we stand a good chance of getting a link from them.

Techniques For Finding Link TargetsIn this section I will outline a few simple techniques that you can use to turn your idea of “food bloggers” into a full list of websites that you can contact.

Find Lists of Bloggers

By far the most simple place to start is a search on Google like this:

This single search gave me lots and lots of great lists to search through. The big advantage of using this technique is that someone else has already done the hard work for you by curating the list.

You can then copy the list into Google Docs or your own spreadsheet. From here, you can copy and paste all the URLs into a tool like URL opener, which will open all the URLs for you with one click. You can then go through them all, find out if they’re relevant to your content, and if so, find their contact details.

Find Bloggers on Twitter

Followerwonk is a fantastic tool that is part of the Moz tools, and if you have a Moz Pro subscription you can use it for free. It allows you to do all kinds of cool stuff with your Twitter account, but the feature that we’re interested in allows you to search Twitter bios. We are going to search it for “cupcake blogger” to see if we can find anyone on Twitter who mentioned “cupcake blogger” in their bio:

You can select more options such as number of followers and location, but for now we want to keep the search quite broad. This search resulted in 12 people on Twitter being found:You can then download these results into a spreadsheet which makes them easier to sort through. It will also tell us if they have a website or not:

Not a bad result for a few minutes’ work! These are also super-relevant to our content, so we know that we have a good chance of getting a link or, at the very least, getting some good feedback from the blogger.

What Types of Links You Need

When defining the strategy for your link building campaign, you will need to think about the types of links you need to get. There are various types to consider:

1. Links to your homepage2. Links to “deep” pages (such as product or category pages)3. Links containing your brand / company name4. Links containing the keywords you’re targeting

Additionally, there are combinations of the above, such as a branded link to a deep page. Identifying what types of links you need will start with a detailed link analysis of your current website as well as a look at how you rank for certain keywords in comparison to your competitors. You can use Open Site Explorer to run this kind of analysis and see what your link profile currently looks like.The analysis will show you opportunities for improvement. For example, you may see that you’re not ranking for one of your main keywords. After doing some link analysis, you find that you have no links pointing to your website that contain this keyword, or, you find that the most relevant deep page has no links at all pointing at it. If you identify something like this, you have a tangible problem that you can work to resolve. In this case, it may mean that your strategy includes trying to build links to the deep page that currently doesn’t have any links and doesn’t rank for your target keywords.

Finding link targets

The first thing you need to think about is what types of people you should contact, as you want to make sure that you are contacting people who are likely to be interested in your content. If you contact people randomly, your response rate will be a lot lower, and you’re likely to give yourself and your website a bad reputation.Ideally, before you actually start a link building campaign, you should have a rough idea of who you think will care about what you’re doing. If you create a piece of content that you want links to, such as an infographic, you should ask yourself right at the start of the process who will care about it. More importantly, who will care enough to actually link to it?

This last bit is crucial. While you may find it quite easy to get people look at your content, it is a whole new level of engagement for them to actually link to it. Linking to something requires a bit of effort and time, so you need to make someone care enough for them to not mind doing this. The barrier for getting your content shared on social networks is much lower. More people have a Twitter or Facebook account than a website or blog, making it easier for them to share.

So How Do You Make People Care Enough to Link?You need to find a hook that makes people care. You need to work this hook into your content right from the start. If you put off creating your hook until the moment you begin your outreach, you may discover that no one cares about the point of your content, the result being that you will have devoted a lot of time to crafting content no one wants to link to.

There are lots of hooks, but the ones above should at least get you thinking about what you can offer to people that will make them link to you. A simple exercise you can do here is to go to your Facebook feed and see what links people are sharing. Note down what characteristics each link has and try to find patterns. Chances are that links shared on Facebook are funny, because many people use this platform for personal stuff and may not share more serious stuff there, with the exception of big news or controversial topics. Now go and take a look at your Twitter feed, note down which types of links are being shared there and ask yourself why. You may find that more long-form, informative content is shared on Twitter than on Facebook.

How to Start a Link Building Campaign

A link building campaign is the process of actively trying to increase links to your website, usually accompanied by some kind of overarching objective. It will use assets belonging to the website in order to acquire those links, and an asset can be anything from content and news to products and services

Structuring a Link Building Campaign

There are various components of a link building campaign; some will be crucial to success and others will be helpful but not necessarily essential. Much will depend on a combination of your available assets and resources.

Setting GoalsLink building is a form of online marketing, and with any form of marketing you should start with goals. Knowing the goals of your campaign right at the start helps to ensure that you create a strategy that gives you the best possible chance of success. You also need to ensure that the goals of your link building campaign tie in closely with the overall goals of your business. For example, “build 10 links” is not a good goal to hit if building 10 links does not have any impact on the overall success of the business.“You also need to ensure that the goals of your link building campaign tie in closely with the overall goals of your business.”Here, we encounter a slight issue. We learned earlier that links are a strong part of the search engine ranking algorithms. So, wouldn’t hitting a goal of more links help with rankings? Helping with rankings helps drive more traffic and this helps bring more customers, right? All of this is true, but the problem is that it can sometimes take time for the links you’ve built to start having an overall positive effect on rankings. It isn’t as simple as build links one day and see improvements the next. This is particularly true in competitive industries.This poses a problem for SEOs because it can be hard to show that a link building campaign is successful, even if it hits certain goals. For this reason, it is very important to not only set realistic goals, but to make sure that the goals you set are more intelligent than “build x links.” The goals need to tie into real organizational goals and ultimately have a positive impact on the bottom line of your business. For example, you may want to increase organic search traffic in order to drive more sales. At the same time, you need to educate those around you that SEO and link building doesn’t succeed overnight and that results are not instantaneous. Like any good marketing, the focus should be on long-term gains, not overnight quick-wins.

Finding Your AssetsAt the heart of any link building campaign is the asset that you’re going to use in order to attract and earn links. This can also be known as the “hook” that will make people care about what you have to offer, and will entice them into linking to you. Assets will vary from business to business and you need to identify which assets your business has that will be of interest to others and can be used in link building.One other asset that black-hat SEOs still use is money. Obviously, all assets will probably require an investment of some kind, but these SEOs approach link acquisition as a pure cash transaction. Buying links is strictly against Google’s guidelines, and if a website is caught engaging in this practice, it can mean a heavy penalty and loss of traffic. Buying links is risky and usually the risks will outweigh the potential loss, so we strongly recommend against it.

You’ll also need to make sure that the assets you create are relevant to the audience you’d like to attract. Aleyda Solis put together an in-depth walk-through that’s worth a look.

Types of Links (Both Good and Bad)

As we mentioned, quality is more important than ever, because Google has begun penalizing websites that build low-quality or spammy links. In the past, SEOs have been able to border on the risky side when it came to link building. Techniques such as article submissions and directory listings were commonly recommended by SEO companies, because they worked well and posed little risk if done correctly. However, times have changed with the introduction of the Penguin updates from Google which aggressively hurt websites that pursue these low-quality link building techniques. In this chapter, we’ll give you a sense for the types of links you should and shouldn’t focus on building.

“Natural” Editorial Links

This type of link is the holy grail for SEOs. Essentially, these are the links that you didn’t even have to ask for because they are editorially given by other website owners. This is much more efficient than having to contact someone and ask them to link to you. However, you need to give someone a good reason to do so, and you need to find ways of making large numbers of bloggers aware of that reason.An example of a good reason may be a great piece of content that you’ve created which you then seeded with a few key influential bloggers, and through that process more bloggers have naturally become aware of it. This is hard to do and can take time, which is part of why these types of links are so highly valued. They are also the types of links that Google often hold up as great examples, indicating that they will stand the test of time.

Manual “Outreach” Link Building

This is probably one of the most common types of link-building you’ll perform as an SEO, particularly if you’re just starting out or your business is still quite small and unknown. It involves manually contacting website owners and bloggers, asking them to link to you. Again, you need to give them a reason to link to you and to be successful, you need to be contacting people who are relevant. If you’re contacting people who have no connection to your industry, then they are likely to be confused when you ask for a link.

Self-created, Non-editorial Links

This type of link is generally frowned upon these days, as it often falls in line with black-hat practices that aim to fool the search engines into thinking a piece of content is relevant and important when it actually isn’t (more on black-hat practices in Chapter 6). With the introduction of Penguin in 2012 (and the subsequent updates to it), Google has begun devaluing and even penalizing this type of link.Due to these links not being editorially given, they inherently carry less weight than the other types of links. In the past, they have been useful for some SEOs working on certain websites, but you should use great caution in their implementation now.

A few examples may be:

• Blog comments that are not moderated• Press releases with optimized anchor text• Article directories• Guest post signatures• Advertorials• Embeddable widgets• Infographic embeds• User profile pages• Guestbooks• Forum signatures• Directories that are not moderated

The types of links you choose to pursue with your strategy should depend on your existing link profile, but in general, you should avoid links that are not editorially given. Instead, you should focus on the tactics that will give you editorial links that add value to your website and business.

How Long Will It Take for Link Building to Improve a Site’s Ranking?

As mentioned in the previous section on setting goals, it can take time for link building to have a positive effect on the rankings of your website. The length of time can vary greatly and depend on a number of factors:

The competitiveness of your industry as a whole• How competitive your target keywords are• The activity of your competitors, i.e., if they are actively building links, too• The types of links you’re building• The history and strength of your domain

All of these factors can mean that it can take from several days to several months before an increase in ranking is achieved. This should be factored into your goals and expectations and all parties should be made aware that instant improvement is unlikely.A realistic expectation to set is that you will see an increase in traffic if you are constantly working on improving your website, business, and online activity. You should try to not think of link building as a one-off activity, because you may be disappointed by the results. Instead, link building should be a constant stream of activity coupled with other initiatives such as content creation, great customer service and social media. Combined, all of this activity can lead to an increase in traffic and an increase in revenue for your business. It is the combination and a consistent drive towards the goal that can make this more likely to happen quickly.•The competitiveness of your industry as a whole• How competitive your target keywords are• The activity of your competitors, i.e., if they are actively building links, too• The types of links you’re building• The history and strength of your domainHow Long Will It Take for Link Building to Improve a Site’s Ranking?

Quick Tips For Efficient Outreach

Even though you want to take the time to personalize your emails, there are a few good tools that you can use to speed up your process without compromising on quality.BoomerangI mentioned Boomerang earlier, saying how it can be a great tool for making sure you follow up with people using this nice little feature:

It also has another great feature that allows you to schedule when an email is sent. This is very handy if you’re doing outreach across different time zones. A good example being if you’re in Seattle and you’re outreaching to UK based bloggers, when you get into the office and start emailing at 9am, it is nearly the end of the working day in the UK. This may not be the ideal time to email someone.

So, Boomerang allows you to schedule when an email is sent. Once you’ve installed the app, a little button appears in Gmail:When you compose an email and click on this, you get this dropdown:

From here you can schedule the email and make sure it reaches someone at the right time.

Canned ResponsesCanned responses is a Gmail Labs feature (read how to enable Labs here) and allows you to quickly insert pre-written templates into an email. This is super-handy for a number of reasons, one of which being that you don’t need to worry about copying and pasting into your emails every time. Instead, you can just select the canned responses option and insert the relevant text:

This is extra-useful if you combine it with Boomerang and use it to follow up with people. You can create a canned response that follows up with people you’ve already emailed. Using our example from earlier, it may look something like this:All of this information can help me to find out a little bit more about him and help to further personalize my email to him. For example, if he has recently tweeted a news story that I know about, I can comment on it, too. This shows I’ve taken the time to do my research on him, rather than just sending a blanket email to lots of people.There is a bunch of information including:Rand’s locationHis position at MozHis Twitter accountHis LinkedIn profileNote that the bits highlighted in yellow are the parts that you personalize to the person you’re contacting. You still need to personalize it, otherwise you’re not likely to get a response.

RapportiveRapportive is a great plug-in for Gmail and Outlook which gives you quite a bit of information about the person you’re emailing. Here is an example of how Rapportive looks when I try to send an email to Rand:

All of this information can help me to find out a little bit more about him and help to further personalize my email to him. For example, if he has recently tweeted a news story that I know about, I can comment on it, too. This shows I’ve taken the time to do my research on him, rather than just sending a blanket email to lots of people.

Outreach Pitfalls to Avoid

There are a few common mistakes that can happen when you’re link building. Mistakes happen; this is fine as long as you learn from them. Hopefully, this section will help you learn from other people’s mistakes and avoid some of these pitfalls.Using Mass Emailing SoftwareThere are many providers of software which allow you to email lots and lots of people at once. This is a legitimate practice as long as people have opted into hearing from you and are expecting the email. Lots of companies do this all the time with their mailing lists. However, when it comes to link building, it is generally a bad idea to use any kind of software like this.

Here Are a Few Reasons:•It is much harder to personalize mass emails like this•If you make a mistake, it isn’t just one recipient that sees it; all of them do•You can get yourself blacklisted if people start reporting you as spam•You are possibly breaking the law if you’re mass emailing people who have not opted into being emailed in this manner

Add to this the fact that you’re jeopardizing not only your own reputation, but that of the website you’re representing, ruining any chance of the website owner working with the email recipients in the future.Not Customising Your Template Earlier, you saw an email template that I could use for follow up:Imagine sending this email to someone without editing the yellow bits? It is VERY unlikely to get a positive response! This is why in this particular example, I’ve chosen to highlight the sections in yellow so that I’m less likely to forget about them.If this does happen, the undo send feature of Gmail Labs can sometimes rescue the situation if you’re quick enough.

Dealing With Negative Replies

At some point, you’re probably going to get negative replies to your outreach. This is normal and something that you shouldn’t worry about. In fact, it can be a great opportunity to engage with a blogger and get further feedback from them. In this section are a few principles to bear in mind when dealing with negative replies.Always Reply; Don’t Ignore the EmailIt can be tempting to just ignore the email and move on, particularly if you’ve put your heart and soul into a piece of content that someone just doesn’t like. But, ignoring the reply means that you’re damaging your chances of ever building a good relationship with that person. They may not like the current work you’ve done, but what about the next piece you do? The last thing you want to do is alienate anyone so that they don’t even bother looking at your future pieces of work.Get As Much Information and Feedback As PossibleWhen replying to someone, try to get some feedback on why they’re not interested in linking to you. If you’re promoting a piece of content, ask them for their opinion on what would make the content better. Is there a better way of presenting the information? Are there extra facts or statistics that would have made it more valuable or effective?Sometimes the problem may not be the content itself. Instead, the blogger just may not have time to write a blog post and link to you. In that case, you may want to offer the blogger some help with writing the post so that they don’t need to spend time on it. At the same time, you could ask the person for their opinion on what content is sorely needed in their industry. Do they see a demand for something, but do not have the time to create it themselves? There is great opportunity here if you look for it. For example, you may be able to come to an agreement in which you partner with the blogger to create a piece of content. You put the work into the content which they want to see created, and they use their contacts to help promote it. Together, you’ve created something valuable for the industry.

Also, imagine you get a good idea for a piece of content from them. Then you go away and create it, email them again and show them. They are probably going to be much more receptive this time around! Even more so if you can somehow give them credit for the idea, perhaps a small mention or a link on the piece of content which would acknowledge them again and show them.

Following Up

I have probably built just as many links as a result of following up with people as I have with my first email. People are busy; popular bloggers will get lots of emails, and in a world where we can check email on the move, your email may get buried pretty quickly and forgotten.For this reason alone, it is worth making sure that you follow up on all outreach if you don’t get a reply first time. The added benefit here is that you also reinforce the fact that you’re a genuine person and not some automated piece of software that is hitting lots of websites at once.In order to follow up properly, you need to keep your outreach as organized as possible and record the replies that you get. The last thing you want is to follow up with someone who has already linked to you!There are a few ways to stay organized with your outreach ranging from very simple Excel spreadsheets to fully integrated customer relationship management (CRM) systems. Let’s look at some of these options.An Excel SpreadsheetWhen you’re first starting out with link building, a simple spreadsheet will work just fine. Even at the intermediate level, it can still do the job, but it can become a bit big and cumbersome if you’re working on multiple campaigns at the same time.

Specialist Tools for Outreach Management At this point, you may need to invest in a more robust, focused system for managing your outreach. There are a few options here such as BuzzStream and Raven which are probably the most popular for this kind of task.BoomerangBoomerang is a free plug-in for Gmail with a nice little feature that we can use for following up with outreach targets. When sending an email, you can tell Boomerang to send the email back to you if you don’t get a reply within a set period of time.

In this case, if the person I’m emailing doesn’t reply within two days, Boomerang will send the email back to me. At this point I can quickly follow up with them and the great thing is that I can be sure that I’m not emailing the wrong people who may have already replied.Combine this with canned responses (outlined below) and you have a quick and effective way of following up with all your link targets.How to Follow UpIn terms of exactly how to follow up with people, my advice is to keep the email short and to the point. You’ve already emailed them once and outlined all the details they need, so you don’t need to repeat it all over again. If you reply to the same email you sent, then most email programs will actually include the original email, anyway, so the person can scroll down and find it very easily if they want to.In Terms of What to Say, Something As Simple As This Can Do the Job:Hey John,I just wanted to follow up on the email I sent a few days ago (pasted below) regarding the ultimate guide to backpacking that I’ve put together. It would be great to get your feedback, if possible, and see if this is something you’d be interested in sharing with the readers of your blog.I look forward to hearing from you.Thanks!Paddy

(Here you can include the original email so they can refer to it if they can’t remember it.)It’s nice and short, says what you need it to, and is polite. I usually tend to follow up with someone once. If I still do not get a reply, I’ll probably move on and not contact them any more for this particular campaign. If you follow up any more, you’re running the risk of annoying them and actually damaging your chances of building a relationship with them.