No getting responses while doing outreach

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So I am pretty much following a template from Authority Hacker for outreach but I'm not getting the responses.

I'm also using a "persona" for outreach, which is a pic of a hot chick.

When it comes to choosing targets, I just reverse engineer my competition and email the sites that are linking to their content.
 
Bloggers probably are a bit smarter than your average visitors, so they are aware of fake shit. So I wouldnt use the hot chick stuff.

Who are you emailing ? The regular email like : info@domain.com , or actually finding the personal emails, which can take some time, but will increase your chances by a lot.

Is your content worth linking to ? This is probably the most important thing.
 
Klayne said:
Bloggers probably are a bit smarter than your average visitors, so they are aware of fake shit. So I wouldnt use the hot chick stuff.

Who are you emailing ? The regular email like : info@domain.com , or actually finding the personal emails, which can take some time, but will increase your chances by a lot.

Is your content worth linking to ? This is probably the most important thing.
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Hmm interesting, I thought a female would help conversions. Also mainly the regular emails, havent found many personal emails.

Is your content worth linking to ? This is probably the most important thing.
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It's better than the Cosmopolitans etc they are linking to but it's nothing amazing. I have only tried with this piece of content though, so I will give some of the other articles a shot too and see what happens
 
hah. You're the king of getting worried too soon.

Create a list of 500 e-mails. E-mail all 500 of those people over 2 weeks. Expect a 1-3% return on your work. So....5 - 15 successful links for 500 e-mails.
 
Yeah I wouldn't use a hot chick for blogging outreach... I mean really think about the mentality of a person who runs around with hot chicks as their avatar...

But seriously, Can you provide the template, I get a ton of these default template outreach emails and ignore every single one of them.

I also think everyone's templated approach to outreach sucks, like really bad. In any relationship you want to build you usually give first versus ask for something. Even giving compliment and a little back and forth about topics in the industry helps build rapport. And most people only send out an email once and that's it. I probably get over 1000 emails in a single day, and my email program does it's best to filter them into folder and junk. But there are times emails get lost that could have been worthwhile. I remember some SEO guru big name got angry that a business partner didn't see one of his emails... Dude was going ballistic in a long rant, and I'm just like "Chill" viper... maybe we just didn't see it or there was a family emergency going on? You never know...

How many times did you contact each individual? Recall:

CCarter: "There are also people that won't bother replying to a person if they only try to contact them once. It's sort of a filter for the people that are serious. Some people won't reply until 7 attempts have been made! I thought it was crazy, but then realized it's actually pretty smart. That's where I've taken a cue from in my thinking. If someone is serious and it seems a bit difficult to contact me, they'll try on the hour every hour to figure out how to get in contact."

Sauce: Gather Round Hustlers That's If You're Still Living
​

Edit: 10 emails? You gotta be joking right?
 
Thanks for the replies, realized I really goofed in terms of quantity. ^^

CCarter said:
give first versus ask for something
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I tried to leverage social for this, so if you link then I'll share it with my followers etc.

--

Right, I will go and make a big list of emails now, send them over the next few days, and if I don't get any responses I will post back in this thread.
 
built said:
Right, I will go and make a big list of emails now, send them over the next few days, and if I don't get any responses I will post back in this thread.
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Figure out the target keyword, which should yield the most relevant competitors for you. Once you done that, go trough the first 30 - 50 results, and take all the ones you think are relevant and could have links from sites that would also link to you. Use Mozbar, or Majestic/aHrefs if you more experienced, and take the sites who have at least 20 - 30 + backlinks, then you should end up with lets say 10 sites that have more than 20+ backlinks and also would make sense to have linking domains who could link to you.

Then you pull all the fucking backlinks in a spreadsheet, and should have at least 1000 URL, if not then search for more. Filter them out from dupes and shit, also can filter them by DA/PA or some shit, but they can be terrible data, but its a start.

And now the fun part starts, go trough all of them, a lot of them will be junk, some of them wont fit your article, and some of them won't just make sense to put a link on, some outdated etc.

But there will be a lot of good ones too, the better the site, the more time should be spent looking for a personal email. This is were you can get creative.

Some tools to help you :
- http://toofr.com ( Paid one :confused: , but has some free functions)
- https://emailhunter.co/ (Paid one :confused:, but I think 150 searches per month free )
You can insert name, surname and domain and it will do some magic .
- http://mailtester.com/
Can help you verify if email working, but isnt always accurate, but still.
- https://rapportive.com/
Compose a new email and try to guess the e-mail, if its the right one, rapportive will show his linked in profile and data.

Okey, this should get you gear spinning.

Damn helping people is time consuming.


P.S Would like some experienced members, to give some improvements on this.

EDIT :
Forgot to mention.
Here is a spreadsheet to help with Rapportive : https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1RY5Z2jP5g5n-HAHzUT2ILO5N2frdiWklbWFrkZkypOI/edit#gid=0

Insert the data, and copy all the emails and compose a new e-mail and paste the data, so this should increase the chances of finding personal e-mail trough Rapportive for free.
 
built said:
I tried to leverage social for this, so if you link then I'll share it with my followers etc.
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That's a horrible approach, its completely selfish and only in your interest. How would you feel if you were on the other end of that great deal?
 
Thanks for the tips & links @Klayne, working on it now

CCarter said:
That's a horrible approach, its completely selfish and only in your interest. How would you feel if you were on the other end of that great deal?
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I would say it depends on how big their brand footprint is, but coming from someone like me with little brand footprint I wouldn't feel too great about it, I'd not respond

So now that I think about it, might be better to do a "guest post" offer free quality content in exchange?
 
I've been having great success lately with outreach. I'd say 65-75% success rate, and about 15% are celebrities that I didn't expect to get back to me anyways. I have gotten a hold of some executive editors recently of high end magazines (ones that actually have paper magazines and a website).

What I have been doing:
Spend a lot of time finding the specific person who wrote or edited an article you want to be featured in.

Avoid using a template. Write your own email to them and if you find one that is starting to work, you COULD use it again but add a personal touch each time (read below).

Here is what normally gets me a response (at least I believe this is what it is): After I am done asking if I could possibly find a way to become featured in there article, I add a bit that says something personal about them. If they have a personal blog, which many of them do, comment about it. Recently I found an editor who had a blog that was very unpopular but was aimed at their own style of humor. I went ahead and added something in about how I really liked her writing style on that blog, and also made a few comments on how her writing style compared to another writer whom I have actually read paperback books of before. Now this was a TRUE comment. I really did find her style similar to that author and found the blog of theirs to be very humorous. I won't go into detail on that, but if you really do your research, find more out about the writer, and make the email very personal/engaging, you will have a much better chance at getting a response.

What I have also found to work, was following up, and numerous times at that, if you're not getting responses. So far, my follow ups have netted me about a 70-80% replies.

Some of the editors/writers of the article you are trying to become featured in will not be writing for that company anymore/their contract will be over. When this happens, I ask them for the email of whom I should get into contact with to get in said article. They always give me it. Some will tell you not to tell the editor how you got their email, so be sure to mention it took a lot of digging to actually find the email; and be prepared to answer how digging actually got their contact email by doing a simple google search for it. You'll be able to figure that out on your own.

This is my personal opinion but don't try and automate this process. Your success rate will be lower, and you will burn bridges that way. Eventually, you are going to be lacking high quality sites to outreach to and you will have already messed with your chances of getting featured by having already contacted many of these sites with an automated template.
 
You're gonna have to nurture your lead and also provide more value.

Trust me, I've looked over templates like that and I can tell you most of them were never used by the people that offered them to you, they just had someone whip them up as "value" in their blog without using them. Not saying that's what Authority Hacker did at all, just saying it's common practice because 90% of people just read and never implement anyways so no one even catches it.

You need to think of this editor as a sales lead. Reach out and talk to them 3-4 times before you ever ask anything of them.

Also, why email if you're doing 10 a day. Get on the damn phone and see if you can talk to them live and form a relationship that way.

Do what other people are to lazy to do.
 
Gary Vaynerchuk loves having long Twitter chats as a way to build relationships with random influencers you want something from 'in future'. I don't do enough of that personally but the few times I do end up randomly chatting with someone on Twitter, LinkedIn or a Forum... it's pretty effective so it's definitely on the list for the year to play with more.


With regards to templates. They will work but as I said in my outreach guide you can assume they are at best the idiot proof version of what you should be doing - take them, use them on enough people and you'll get something and can't really embarrass yourself totally. The most important thing with outreach is to do the thinking by yourself... and actually think about what good things the person is really doing and not sharing in their guide... but I already went on about that enough in my crash course chapter so I won't repeat it all here.

Also what you're trying to achieve with your outreach will determine your strategy and what content you should be outreaching about. If you want links, for example, you need the stuff to be 'linkworthy' and believe it or not that's often slightly different to 'viral' or 'shareworthy'. The people who tend to be linking tend to be taking more time and wanting to share things of 'specific value' to their latest article or to their links page. Influencers with social profiles can have that same barometer for what they share, but they can also have additional wildly different reasons to share your content - it fitting with the 'vibe' of their feed, what they're trying to achieve, the life image they are trying to project and so on or just 'hey my audience might be interested'.

Having a female persona does correlate with more replies... sometimes. My guess is you have 'overdone' it with the fakeness. Having said that my team do manual outreach in their real names and 'being male' doesn't seem to be a disadvantage when the outreach is quality so my assumption is the tests we've done in the past with templates and different names yielded a difference because 'when the outreach is "bad" they at least opened the female persona's message'. When the outreach is relevant, and good, and useful to the recipient, I think that 'edge' disappears mostly.
 
Obviously your template is not working.
You can now
a) ditch that approach completely and go the twitter/facebook/whatever route
b) A/B TEST different templates
c) Combine email (after A/B testing the approach) and other routes

(I'd go for c)
 
I forgot to mention in my post #12 from above, one thing that has also worked fairly well for me. If they have not responded to you for some time, when you send them a follow up message, if you go to your sent mail, and hit reply for said email, it'll add the Re: tag to your subject. Obviously you could just add it yourself, but it's simple to just do it from your sent box and it obviously adds your prior message.

Typically this will make them think they have already read your message before and possibly replied, and will give a much better chance at them opening that email, especially since the subject line is most likely tailored to something related to them, their company, or the company they work/write for in the first place.
 
The "Chill" viper made me laugh so hard haha
 
BigWhite said:
I forgot to mention in my post #12 from above, one thing that has also worked fairly well for me. If they have not responded to you for some time, when you send them a follow up message, if you go to your sent mail, and hit reply for said email, it'll add the Re: tag to your subject. Obviously you could just add it yourself, but it's simple to just do it from your sent box and it obviously adds your prior message.
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Isn't this a great way to get into the spam folder?
 
Is there any way to figure out if your emails are being delivered into their inbox (and not into their spambox).
 
You can use bananatag to see when your email is opened. Helps to know if your email is being read but not responded to so you have a better idea about it being marked as spam.
 
Outreach to blogs today is sorta similar to me as outreach was for "link exchange" back in the early '00s. Others have already touched on this, but for me personally, the best way to get me to do something is to be adamant about getting in touch. And keep being friendly.

I also get outreach emails (albeit not in the thousands), and I'm constantly facepalming at the effort that goes into them. They'll usually send you an email asking straight up how to post on your site, and won't even tell you the site of course. So right off the bat, you are you doing the work, having to request more info and find out what this is about.

If I don't reply, 95% of the time they won't try again (apart from someone else from the same site/company asking the same question, because they don't keep track of who they get in touch with). The last 5% of the time, they'll get mad and send me an angry mail asking why they are put on ignore. Baffling, I know.

As for the template emails: You don't even have to be trained to be able to spot them a mile away. Especially if your site is popular, because you'd have gotten a variant before. The "edited" templates are especially amusing to me, because it's clear it goes something like "Great site, I particularly liked the post about [insert subject]". Fake compliments does very little for me.

When I reach out, and if it's a site I really want my link on, I'll do actual work to get to know it/them. If possible, I'll build rapport before asking for the post, but I'll also get to know their site and be ready with a idea if prompted. I explain that because of X and Y, a post about Z would benefit them. It's a lot more work and time consuming, but I've found that it often gets me links on sites my competitors are not on.

If I don't get a reply at first, I'll keep at it, without spamming them obviously. If possible I'll try and include new/more info in each mail, so it doesn't go "you didn't reply, so here's my email again". I'll do up to 4 tries, but maybe I should bump that up to 7 ^^ Good to know.
 
Do What Others Won't Do; Go Where Others Won't go; Be What Others Won't Be ...

Here are my thoughts for you on outreaching:
-There are many ways to outreach, seems like you focused only on emails, is that correct?
Pick-up the phone, go to your local chamber of commerce, meetups, local groups if those are applicable to your market. Go where you can connect with people in your market. I don't say don't use emails ... Im just saying use all the tools available online and offline.

-A template is ok to start but cause it worked for someone else doesnt' mean it will for you.
So use it as a "starting point" and create your own. At least with a template you have a starting point if you not sure where to start.

-A hot chick pic? come on man ... I don't think those you are trying to reach out will take it seriously.
If you want to use a picture get a nice one (pro) done and use that, it will be more real.
Perso I can't stand those fake emails from people impersonating others ... thanks for spam filters :smile:

-About reverse engineering your competition ... there should be a biography (not always) of the person who provided content, look them up. When you contact them always reference the wonderful article they wrote and how you enjoyed it. Gotta boost their ego ... it's the truth that's how the world works, we all like to be praised.
But do it if you are sincere, faking will be obvious unless you have amazing writing skills.

-If you want anyone to link to your content ... I will say what others said before ... make it worth linking to.
You don't need to be the Picasso of content creation BUT your content should stand out. Check out the skysraper method (backlinko.com/skyscraper-technique) and this (https://www.buildersociety.com/threads/day-7-content-planning.1365/)

-I like the rule of 100 ... do everything in a 100 lot. The goal is to get a feel of the feedback you can get before going further. 100 is an easy number to put your mind around. I think most people just stop too short and give up to easily. Now if you want to send 1000, then do over 10 days if it makes it easier for you ... but just do it!!

-Most people will ignore the first few emails ... you must keep doing it.
Look at some of those silly TV ads ... many of them are irrelevant to you but they keep hammering in your head again and again. And guess what the day you are looking for a similar product ...
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