in this video you're going to get a step-by-step over-the-shoulder walkthrough on how to properly email for backlinks a while back I asked a YouTube Community if anyone had a site they wanted to volunteer for a link building campaign I'll reveal who I chose in a sec but there's a Twist to this story everyone in their grandma says that you can't build links for free these days but this girl thinks you can baby the link Builder gender female location Amsterdam SEO nerd level s tier in fact BB says that free links are the norm if you go about it the right way baby likes to stand out from the crowd by using humor and wit in her Outreach emails so you know what I'm gonna put her to the test I'll take one of her magical emails unsullied by my meddling hands and see if it can really pull off free links and in the meantime I'll be teaching you how I do Outreach link building the way I do it if we haven't met before my name is Matt dignity and I build links for a living literally an email Outreach is the primary way I get them email Outreach works like this you find a site that you want links from you email them and you ask them for a link usually in exchange for something you're offering them some kind of perk for example you might offer to write a guest post for them so what you're offering them is free content it sounds simple but it's not why because everyone is doing it the email inboxes of the webmasters you're trying to reach are getting spammed to death with hundreds of these requests per day you need to stand out which is why I wanted to see what's so damn special about bibby's emails can her emails really stand out in a sea of spam not only that but can they really get links for free let's see but real quick before we start in the pin comment below you'll see I left a link to my free SEO training masterclass it goes over everything I'm doing today to get sites to the top of Google click the link in the pin comment to book your spot now let's get started the website we'll be using for this case study walkthrough is taughtup. com so Chris Taylor thanks for your submission and congrats taught up is an education blog which focuses on Learning and Development both in the workplace and school the first step in the process of Outreach link building is to figure out which sites you want links from this is called link prospecting you want links that are relevant to the site that you're linking to so for Chris we want to get links that are close enough in topic to the subject of Education of course getting links from straight up education sites is great but these are Chris's competitors so they're not likely to give them links so instead we look for shoulder niches niches that are similar but relevant the best way to figure out your shoulder niches is to Simply look at your navigation bar taught up gets into virtual training working from home online learning and even blogging so getting a link from any other site on these topics is great another approach is to use your Noggin and think which other kinds of websites would share the same audience taught up focuses on professional development as can be seen right here in their main headline right in front of your face who else cares about professional development HR people folks who deal with human resources in fact I know from experience that HR Tools in particular is a content-rich niche with plenty of websites doing content marketing so that increases our chances of Landing a guest posts with one of bibby's super emails of course so we know we're going to be pitching to HR websites where do we find them since this is a video on how I do Outreach I'll be using a tool called pitch box to demo the steps that said I also know that there's viewers just starting out so I'll also be recreating these steps for you without software in Pitch box you start by creating a campaign on the following screen select advanced search operator put a campaign name at the top here then head on down to the bottom to the keyword section you're going to enter in a bunch of keywords pitchbox will go out and find websites that rank for these keywords you'll notice that I put the in url pricing modifier in here since it's only software websites that would have a pricing page this guarantees I won't get any comparison or review sites why would I only want software tool websites I got this tip from Bibby because these are actual companies that care about their content care who they link to and will grow over time they're also less likely to accept money for links very nice next you set up the quality filters so if you only want an ahrefs domain rating of 30 or higher or traffic of over a thousand visitors per month you do that here click next and grab a copy while the tool does its thing and finds you websites to get links on okay so if you want to do this without pitch box you use Google itself do a search like HR software in neural pricing to bring up a list of websites then start to add these websites to a spreadsheet you can use the free tool SEO minion to download them all in one go rinse and repeat for the other keywords in your list next you do a deeper dive into these sites and make sure you really want a link from them in Pitch box they call this the inspection step up here at the top filter for HR to make sure you're only looking for HR tools then you can just click on these domains one by one to bring them up in the preview pane this one looks good so you'll move it to the next phase personalization this one 99 firms looks more like a review blog than a software tool so go ahead and skip it for now since we're just focusing on HR tools if you you're not using pitchbox it's just a matter of opening up your spreadsheet that you created earlier clicking on these domains one by one and removing them if they're not what you're looking for now back to pitchbox you're now in the personalization phase this is where you're going to ensure you're contacting the right people click personalize here as you can see the tool found a bunch of emails some of them might be from parent or sister companies so we'll delete all the ones not at analytics in hr. com we can also make sure that we have the correct first name here too so if the email is John hrsite.
com we make sure John is written here Pro tip your email conversion will get significantly better if you address the person by their first name to hunt down email addresses without pitchbox takes a little bit more work go to the contact page of the website you want to reach out to and you're very likely to find an email address there or you might get lucky and find contact information for their editors on their about page last year I struck out alright it's almost time to fire off some Outreach emails using bibby's template but before that you want to have an email address to outreach from the ultimate email setup is to have something like this have an Outreach Persona a that the recipient can see which makes the cold Outreach a bit more personal that Persona should have their own domain name and private email address such as John johnsmith. com you should warm up their email for a few weeks by sending manual emails to friends and colleagues for fun don't reveal who you are and remark on the incredible time you have with them that one night three years ago and lastly you should have all the dmarc and SPF settings set up perfectly for example Bibby has a Kylie wall Persona that I'm sure is working well for her to add you can indeed get away with doing Outreach with the free Gmail account which I'll show you how to do soon but a Persona with a custom email address is always going to perform better jump into pitch box to adjust the Outreach schedule here you can set how many emails you want to send per day and also what times you want these emails to hit in boxes now let's take a look at bibi's email templates in pitchbox you can see that we have three emails in the sequence meaning that we'll start with email one if they don't reply they'll get email to and so forth email one starts out with the subject line enthusiasm is common endurance is rare a humble pitch for digity marketing or whatever site we're emailing you can use variables like like these in Pitch box to make the email feel more personal I like the subject line it got my attention you can tell that the sender put some thought into it and it almost sounds like a historical quote we'll see how it did soon the rest of the email pitch is really good too hi Matt she uses the first name field here too for her personal touch hope you take a mini break to celebrate you this Wednesday clever in the past few years we've seen an increase in companies adopting a more holistic approach towards employee well-being why it's no longer enough to offer benefits like gym memberships or free lunch hour yoga lessons employees expect more from their employers and rightly so and they're willing to leave if they don't get it Bibby establishes that she gets the HR industry with those lines she also implies that there's a challenge that needs to be met and that she might have a solution or at least Kylie does to help with this challenge I wanted to share some content ideas that I can write up for your site the new manager's Guide to the seven C's of Team resilience how to certify as a woman-owned business recruiting on Tick Tock the seven step guide to tick tock ads for talent sourcing happy to hear what you think send in any notes if you'd like me to edit any of the ideas about great stuff honestly as a model for a guest post email pitch I don't have much to add it's well done and clever as Bibby advertises let's check out the follow-up emails each sent seven days after the previous email subject line just popping by cat's included so she's switching up the subject line approach just for a variety some people might not be attracted to historical quotes but who doesn't like cats [Music] cat meme great start I wanted to pop in and mute for your thoughts on the topics feel free to let me know if you don't like any of them I'll be happy to adapt and adjust may your Thursday be excellent Kylie short and simple basically she's just hitting the Outreach attempt with a different approach type whereas before it was all serious and thoughtful now she's harnessing the power of humor and cats let's see the final follow-up email subject line efficiency is a highly developed form of laziness more humor and sure enough here's another cat hi Matt looks like my email has missed you this time around no worries when the time comes and you're looking for a creative co-lab I'll be here if opportunity doesn't knock build the door Kylie so this was her Hail Mary the last chance shot at a link or at least a possible collab later so I fired these emails off just to see if we can really get some free links with them I'll show you the results very soon but for you folks that are looking for a free way to send mass emails I gotta get your backs first as mentioned before you can send Outreach emails with free Gmail accounts but deliverability won't be as great and neither will your response rate and you might get carpal tunnel syndrome from cutting and pasting emails to the entire prospecting list you can created but it's free so you can't complain if you want a super cheap automation upgrade check out gmask which actually runs for free up to a certain point my recommendation is to play around with the free version of gmask for a week or two and then decide if you want to upgrade to a more automated approach but if I had to choose between pitchbox and gmask I'm going pitch box all day once you're doing Outreach at scale you need a more professional tool okay so those emails I fired off how do they do that first email pitch was sent to 400 people 215 people opened it and 36 replied for a 16. 74 reply rate that's pretty damn good but don't sneeze at the follow-up emails between the two of them they Farm 26 more replies so you can easily see why it's so important to follow up especially with different approach angles like Bibby did but did they get the ever elusive free links let's open up the inbox on the 11th I sent an email to effortlesshr.
com two days later oh we got a reply back we do accept guest posts we have a few rules one it must be original content and not published anywhere else easy two no excessive links three or four Max or links to any competitor software which include background checks HR software applicant tracking or onboarding systems and time tracking I get that three at least one photo four it must be related to HR five minimum 500 word count six no fee bam that's what's up a free link is within our grasp so I reply back with thanks great I'll get started on an initial draft for you to review and you know how the story goes from here we got a writer working on the content and send it over to effortless HR lo and behold here's our content piece live on effortless with a link to our old friend taught up right here Dr44 website not bad at all but then I noticed something they no follow the backlink all good I just need to work a little bit harder to make things up for Chris toddup. com who had no actual ID I was working for him anyways so I dug back into the Inbox and got back to work and was eventually able to get three more free links do follow us at that one from legalreader dr65 another from insights for professionals dr63 and lastly inside 6q which was up 69.
