Outreach failure

MBS

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So I have sent out over 500 emails in the past month or so and have only landed 1 link.

Got approximately 40+ replies.
Many asked for money
Some said they don't edit old posts
Some said don't email me
a couple said will link
1 linked

That was a very demoralising run.

Emails were semi customized and did not use a template.

Any suggestions
 
Might help if you say what type of outreach you were doing. Broken link? Relevant content? Spamming plz link me?

Were you offering anything of value to the sites?

MBS said:
Many asked for money
Click to expand...

If its a tough vertical to get links in, might be worth paying?
 
Here are the most common things that go wrong - without seeing your site and content and letters none of us can really say for sure what tips you should apply.

I'm assuming you've read my outreach guide (in the crash course here, and in my footer - strongly recommend the entire crash course if you haven't checked it out - they got some great stuff together for a range of contributors) and/or some other decent outreach guides and your starting point for a letter, content and strategy is somewhat 'along the right lines' - if not then you may just be missing the mark completely with what you're attempting to do?

'Bad' site

This one is tough to figure out yourself and even I misjudge client sites now and then as to whether they'll be great for outreach or not. But sometimes a site that's 'perfect' at converting people to $$$ when they visit just doesn't appeal to people with outreach. When you're doing natural outreach (ie not offering to pay or trying to trick people with guest posts where they don't see the links first) and showing people a piece of content for sharing they will check your site out a bit. If they feel it's heavily commercial/aggressive it tends to turn them off. You can mitigate this somewhat by making your linkbaits fully stand alone landing pages without links around your site. Reduces the 'clickabout' a bit.

Poorly Targeted

If the sites you're targeting aren't ones that 'generally link' or are sufficiently close to your topic you'll get a lot of noise, and social shares but not that many links. The range of topics someone will 'share on social' vs 'actually cover on their site' is significantly different, although does overlap in a certain key area - that's the area you need to hit.

Titles!

Outreach is an absolute grind, but you should be getting somewhere around 42% open rate if you're targeting correctly AND hitting the titles so that they are interesting to the site you're outreaching to. That might seem high when some people struggle to do that on opt in lists but in reality people who own sites no X love to read content about X so... it's not surprising that would sometimes beat an opt in list you keep sending sales emails to :wink:.

Wrong Target Pages

Building links to some sales page is suboptimal if you're dong natural outreach. Only a really small subset of people will link naturally to 'best 10 cat toys reviewed' type pages. Make linkbait instead.

Of course I have no idea if these are your actual issues, but hopefully they will help out some other readers. I don't think it's likely that your template is the issue simply because you said you were tailoring and even the worst performing generic templates available on outreach blog posts perform better than that (the worst one I tested recently got a 1% reply rate and 0.6% link rate so better than the stats you put above... so it's unlikely the template + customization you're doing has driven it BELOW a bad template with no customization...).

So I suspect something is going wrong with your target site and its content, the linkbait itself or the targeting of potential prospects.
 
MBS said:
So I have sent out over 500 emails in the past month or so and have only landed 1 link.

Got approximately 40+ replies.
Many asked for money
Some said they don't edit old posts
Some said don't email me
a couple said will link
1 linked

That was a very demoralising run.

Emails were semi customized and did not use a template.

Any suggestions
Click to expand...

I've been provinding Guest Post Outreach service for some time and must say, Outreaching is no simple task to be honest. You are on the right track though. Just sharpen up your target sites and you can start moving on the positive pipeline in no time.

"Many asked for money" - This is pretty common on Outreach process as sites with good metrics and traffic demand to be paid inorder to feature an article over there. It is worth a shot.

Link Exchange - There are chances of you coming across good sites that are un touched and natural in every way and would love to work on a link exchange with you for free.

Keep the outreach going and make a great offer for those who are not interested to work with you, they would definitely turn up for more.
 
Thank you for all the responses. The vertical is finance. The articles I picked were non commercial in nature. Infact site has no monetization as of now. Site looks okay - like a personal blog with a custom logo. So for now I am thinking have decided to offer shares on social media in exchange and possibly do guest posting.
 
MBS said:
Thank you for all the responses. The vertical is finance.
Click to expand...

Finance bloggers - I don't know the reasoning behind it but you'll be hard-pressed to get them to share anything.

Now if you have a decent financial service with the right angle - they will all post Reviews on their blogs of what they think of it to earn affiliate commissions.

Glad I'm not in that niche anymore - It's lucrative but what a pain in the ass it was.
 
Sounds to me like your own content wasn't spicy enough.

The goal is to remove any resistance and excuse up front so there's no reason not to say "yes."

@Steve Brownlie pointed out that you may have had the wrong target page. You should be pointing them to the tastiest target possible created specifically for this purpose, not some money-making page. It should be chock full of data, infographics, lists, interactive jquery, etc. That removes the resistance. Then @Potatoe points out that you should offer up front to write them a new post, intro to the share, offer to promote the page that links to you, etc.

You need to do their entire job for them (they don't have to go out hunting for cool stuff to share on their site, they don't have to write a thing) and then offer them benefits for doing next to nothing (you're going to promote their page on your social channels).

It's just like selling a product. The best packaging and copy writing won't sell a shit product with no benefit to the buyer. The best product won't sell with crappy copy and packaging. It has to be beautiful, useful, and persuasive.
 
I'm just talking shit right now, but I bet the right angle would kick ass in that niche.

Angle towards something that's controversial. It doesn't need to be direct. Can be just somewhat related. Create some social pages and blast the shit out of it.
 
I had better success with "guestographics", you need to publish a good infographic on your site and offer it plus custom intro to other sites with history of publishing infographics. Check backlinko.com about that.
 
Probably, you are just sticking to the notes and are afraid to try other stuff. Don't go with an email template, every time you ask to a blogger. Research about the website, note down the good stuff of the content and praise it to them (but don't overdo), be concise and generic in your email and lastly, fix the broken English.

DaveW said:
I had better success with "guestographics", you need to publish a good infographic on your site and offer it plus custom intro to other sites with history of publishing infographics. Check backlinko.com about that.
Click to expand...

I agree with @DaveW. It's easier to link infographics than to the content.
 
DaveW said:
I had better success with "guestographics", you need to publish a good infographic on your site and offer it plus custom intro to other sites with history of publishing infographics. Check backlinko.com about that.
Click to expand...

Yeah, thats the strategy I am using. Every single post on my site has an infographic.
 
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