§ 01Listen · Watch · SubscribeVol. XV · № 01
§ 02About this episodeVol. XV · № 02
Why a previous stance on automated outreach needed revising.
§ 03Show notesVol. XV · № 03
§ 04Full transcriptVol. XV · № 04
Read Full Transcript ▼
Hi, this is your host Surya define as well. And today I am going to discuss
something which I used to have
very negative opinion about. So I am of course talking about automated outreach, or Outreach at scale. So remember when I say automated outreach, I'm not, you know, talking about hundred percent automated outreach, but rather semi automated outreach. So, you probably have received emails where you get asked by someone who seems like seems like he's not he or she's not a real person like you See their social media profiles. They are typically using Gmail addresses. And they have like a weird or
strange name, you know, like
something like,
you know, Einstein or Stephen hawking@gmail.com or you know, john cena@gmail.com. And they are asking you for a link. So please note that I had the same sort of perception when some would would when someone would mention automated outreach, but what I'm going to share here is actually something quite different actually. So, the process that we are currently implementing in this regard is making sure that Even though you are reaching out to multiple people, that your email still is somewhat personalized, and that there is this, you know, genuine feel to it, that there is some kind of a context or some kind of, of you no familiarity that that reader can find when they get to read your email. Right. And also, to make sure that you're not, you know, asking for like a massive favor right away, but rather you use a multi step approach whereby, in the first step, you're just asking for a micro commitment. Okay. So let me explain what I mean by all of this. So let's say you have an infographic about losing weight and you have shared how a certain diet can help someone lose weight. Right? And then you also have some tips on weight training and maybe how badminton can help with that, how running can help with that and, you know, so on and so forth. Okay, so once you have created that infographic, what you want to do is to pick up one of the subsections of that infographic, whether it's the diet, you know, or it's the way training. So let's say we pick up the diet portion and we try to find out who is ranking for a relevant keyword like you know, weight loss, nutrition or diet for weight loss, you know, and then we find out that Okay, there are like, there is a website called askmen.com Which has an article on the very same topic that you have an infographic on, in fact in your infographic that's just one of the sections and of course, you also also have some other sections right. So, in the next step what you will do is that you will take the askmen.com article, you will put it in H refs and you will find all the websites which are linking to the Ask men.com article, okay. So, now, you have found all the sites which are linking to the topic of weight loss diet or the role of nutrition in weight loss, okay. And remember, these all sites are linking to the Ask men.com article and you have an infographic which speaks about the same topic in a In that visual asset, so, now you may do some
you know list cleaning
some of it you may have done during the during checking out backlinks in href. So, maybe you will remove you know, Chinese and Russian websites, any non English websites perhaps you may remove any sites which have given a nofollow backlink to the askmen article, right. And you might want to also remove perhaps
any sites which
have a lower dr like say, D or 10 or something and you might even want to remove sites which have a very high Dr. Like it can be Dr. 50 plus in your case or Dr. 70 Plus or D or 90 plus because you might want to make sure that in those cases, you are In the case of these extremely large websites, you are doing perhaps completely manual customized outreach to every single
target person.
Okay. But for the other website, let's say the websites which have a DR of 10. Until Dr. 50. You remove the non English websites, you remove the nofollow websites, you remove any other relevant links. Using the automated features that href has. Then you convert that list into a Google Sheet so that you or your link researcher can do some manual cleaning as well. So for instance, one example of manual cleaning would be if you have two links, coming to the admin article from the same website, then you might want to remove the site which has a lower URL or URL rating. So, remember d r or domain rating is the SEO authority of the entire domain and you are or URL authority is the SEO authority or SEO strength of the specific internal page. So the reason you are removing the lower you are website, the lower you are webpage if you have two
backlinks from the same
website is so that when you reach out to this website, you are getting the link from the from the web page which has a stronger SEO authority or higher you are in other words. So another important step of the manual review would be removing any irrelevant websites because sometimes, you know, some of the results within HFS may not be relevant because of the topic you have chosen or Because there might be a competitor's page that you don't want reach out to or there might be another kind of website, which you know, you don't want to contact right or you don't want to get linked from. Another important feature of the manual review is the part where you will add a custom tag or a custom message within that Google Sheet which will be a unique message for every single website. Okay. So what this will do is that it will make
it will make
every email of yours
much more
personalized and it will appear more genuine and what you want to do is to you know, maybe
mentioned something, something specific
about the author that you may have came across within two to four minutes of review of the Article of the author's page of the author's social media. Or you might want to mention something from the article, right? So this step, whereby within the manual review you you review each website very quickly for two to four minutes. You note the website, but rather the article, specifically the author's page. The author's social media may be right. It will
add that
required
familiarity, right. Another thing that you want to do during this step is that you don't want to go ahead and ask for a backlink right away. Instead, what you want to do is that you you mentioned, like I said, you mentioned something specific about the author or their article so that they know that you have, you know, gone through their stuff and it's not like it's not the kind of an email where Your cold email is reaching, you know, thousands of people and there is no relevance there is no connection there is it is evident. And it's evident that you have not done your research even right. So it's not one of those kind of
at scale outreach.
Instead, I think a lot of your time will be spent on the research part. Now after that step is finished. What you want to do is that or in fact, before you can do this before this step is well, what you want to do is to add email addresses as well. And of course, you don't want to add generic email addresses. You may want to use something like hunter.io to find the email addresses right and for the sites which you could not find any email addresses. You can I guess, you know, if you want, you can remove them or you can maybe try to find their email addresses manually. So that's up to you. But what hunter does and what some other tools too, is that once they show you the email addresses for different websites, the prospects list, it will also tell you how likely it is that you may that your email may get bounced back, right. So in our case, what we do is that there are like three types of lists that hunter will give like there are three types of prediction. So it will tell you that it's you know, it's completely safe. It is somewhat safe, or I'm forgetting the exact title, but you know what I mean, right? And the third is, you know, it's extremely risky to send these emails, right. So we just offer the extremely safe emails and we don't contact the somewhat risky males onto somewhat safe males and extremely risky emails. Okay
what we also do is that we
when we load this list to mail shake the use Viola Norbert which is integrated within mail shake to do a check again so Viola Norbert does the same thing with respect to you know, telling us the probability that this email may or may not get get bounced back. So basically we are doing the check twice. So, the benefit of doing this is that you're not wasting time sending mails to sites which you shouldn't contact and I believe if I'm not wrong, this also has to do with making sure that your email address does not get penalized or has any issues reaching to the primary inbox of the recipient Right, you don't want to end up in the spam folder or under the you know the the social promotions folder right. So but but the downside of this approach is that if you draw leads, which you got from h refs per 500 in number after all this manual and automated cleaning and removing removing the risky sites and all that, you may be left with, you know, 50 clean prospects, right? So, five from 500 to 50 is a massive jump. So, what you may then want to do is to add more sites to this list by looking for other sites which rank for the same or similar keywords. So, remember I said go to Google and search for something like you know, nutrition for weight loss or weight loss diet, right. So, you download it Let's say 500 sites, which are linking to the first article that's ranking on Google SERPs. And that article was from askmen.com. So since you were left with 50 email addresses only now after cleaning the list, so you may want to go to the next site within Google SERPs and download its backlinks as well and then clean that list as well and add it to the original list. If you think that you know, the first one and the second one are pretty much similar right. Now, speaking of the micro commitment in the first email, what you want to do is to just, you know, say something like, Hi, I saw your article on XYZ, I totally agree with you on ABC because you know, I have had a similar experience, something like that. By the way, I saw that you linked to it, an article about weight loss, nutrition. Which is from askmen.com, we have actually created something similar and the best thing is that it's a visual asset. It's an infographic and there are tons of interesting statistics within it and a lot of tips about weight loss. Would you like to take a look? Okay, so that's what I mean by asking for a micro commitment. You don't want to go ahead and just you know, ask someone who doesn't know anything about you to to give you a link right. So you make that you if they say yes, what you will do next is that you will send them that infographic and then you can do interaction and, you know, offer them that infographic. You can you can, you know, ask them if they want to republish that infographic on their website, right. Or if that doesn't work out, and you know, of course, you can ask if they would be interested in a guest post or something else, right. So that's another important factor. More importantly, something which we have not done too well, in the past, when we were doing hair outreach, which we are still doing, by the way, and with this semi automated system is that we have not been actively building relations. So what we want to do going forward and what you should do as well is to make sure that you, you build relationships, because when you build relationships, you know, tons of opportunities arise over time. So for instance, you know, you might find out that you guys have some other common interests. You know, with respect to the work you are doing, maybe you will you bow both both sides might decide to do a webinar together, or host each other on each other's podcast or do You know, maybe you can do a
Ask me anything
event for their site or vice versa.
Maybe you can, maybe you find out that your audience and their audience is kind of similar and you can offer them a discount or they can offer your listeners an exclusive discount. So you know, there are tons of opportunities if you don't focus on just the backlink, but you focus on the larger Win Win relationship. Okay, so, we are, we have started this, we think that we need to learn a lot more and we need to test different ideas, we need to test our subject lines.
We need to organize our
processes a bit more. But I think this is going to be an interesting journey and we already do herro outreach. We have done guests Post outreach with a lot of success in the past. Some of you who know a bit more about me already aware that I have written for publications like Forbes, World Bank, business.com, huffpost, and several others, right. And of course we help our clients become authors of different publications as well by providing them coaching and whatnot. We provide guest post outreach as a service as well where we do guest posts for our clients. So, we are very excited about this semi automated system. And like I said in the start of the episode, my opinion about you know, Outreach at scale or you know, automated outreach has changed completely after coming across. Male shake and hundred or yo all of To use different tools and techniques which
ensure that
we do a good job of when reaching out to a target person and that we ensure that we are not wasting their time and that we are contacting them in a manner which, you know, delights them which gets them interested. And I think this is going to be a game changer for us moving forward. That's it for today. If you have any questions or tips or any feedback for me, don't hesitate to reach out to me. Thank you so much for listening and speak soon.