7 Must-Read Tips For Effective Backlink Outreach in 2023

Well-optimized and executed backlink outreach can significantly impact your SEO efforts’ effectiveness. Without backlinks, especially when competing for mid to high-volume keywords, you could have the fastest, most well-optimized, and user-friendly site in the world, and you might not even crack the first five pages of Google. There are several ways for you to put yourself in the position to get backlinks editorially and naturally (with little to no outreach). This includes:

• Creating a useful tool or calculator


• ”Newsjacking” which is just a practice of capitalizing on relevant news trends when creating new content to capture coverage in news results


• Creating the best must-read content of anyone in your industry. You can use the skyscraper technique for this.

However, maybe you are already doing these things. Or maybe you tried these things from several angles, and they haven’t worked out. Either way, you can capture more quality backlinks with the right outreach campaign. A good outreach campaign might only generate a couple of links, but if you target the right prospects, there is a good chance that is all you will need. A few high-quality backlinks can do much more for your rankings and overall search visibility than hundreds or even thousands of low-quality links.

Getting the most out of your backlink outreach campaigns

Here are 7 tips for you to supercharge your backlink outreach campaigns:

1. Plan with precision – If you are just getting started with backlink outreach, you need to take a macro approach to your outreach efforts before you can get into the more “micro” detailed parts of it. You should first decide what the major niches are that you plan to target (Health, Leisure, Travel, etc). After that, you should devise a strategy to find specific outlets/sites to pitch in each niche. You can do this by coming up with short to medium-tail keywords that will yield a litany of relevant sites for you to add to your list. You can also do this through competitive backlink research.


2. Find the right contacts – The last thing you want to do is waste hours on a well-optimized backlink outreach campaign pitching the wrong contacts, or even worse, pitching to gatekeeper emails such as info@ emails, admin@ emails, hello@ emails or contact forms (Yikes!). The response rate for pitching to these is abysmal, and believe me, I unfortunately know (It is less than 1%, possibly even less than 0.5%). Sometimes, a potential link on a site will be too good to pass up, and you won’t be able to find anything other than a gatekeeper email; in those cases, let those “Hail Mary” outreach emails fly!
   However, when assembling your contacts list, drill down as far and wide as possible to find a specific and qualified contact. Here is how I source contacts for backlink outreach campaigns:
   
   
   1. First I use RocketReach. RocketReach is a program that sources contact info via email naming convention estimation and testing, Linkedin scraping, as well as through user-submitted info in exchange for credits to use the site for free. Regardless of how they do it, RocketReach has always had the most robust repository of contacts I’ve encountered. Yes, sometimes they have no contacts for a particular company, or sometimes the contacts are either no longer with the company or their provided email does not work, but you can always just re-source the contact at that point.
      
      Pro Tip – RocketReach will provide you with a link to a particular contact’s Linkedin. Always check that before adding an email to your contact list to ensure each contact is still with the company from which you are looking to source contacts.
   
   
   2. If I can’t find anything on RocketReach, I turn to Hunter.io. Hunter.io is very similar to RocketReach, with a few differences. The main difference is that the data/contacts it has are unique and independent of RocketReach. So, where RocketReach may have returned no contacts for a particular site or company, Hunter.io might have several. An advantage of Hunter.io is that it will provide links to where it found a particular contact, such as a masthead. It will also let you know if the company’s email addresses are “accept all,” which means that no matter what email address you email at that company (real email or not), it will not bounce back with an error.
   
   
   3. If RocketReach and Hunter.io both give you nothing of use or relevance, you can actually turn to Facebook. Find the company’s Facebook business page and click the “About” tab. I would say about 75% of businesses unwittingly have a valid email address listed here. Unfortunately, it is typically just an info@ or socialmedia@ email, but that is better than absolutely nothing. Sometimes you might get lucky and get an actual specific contact’s email using this method.
   
   
   4. If Facebook also fails, you can turn to Google. Yes, this will likely not get you anywhere, but you never know. Sometimes although a company is guarded about its email addresses being public, they may have inadvertently published an email somewhere like a Chamber of Commerce directory list or on an old press release. You can simply start by searching Google for “WEBSITE.com email” – If that doesn’t yield any results, you can use search operators in addition to your search to see if that turns anything up. For example, you can try searching “WEBSITE.com intext: email”


3. Be personable but direct – You want to make sure that you do not come off like a robot or some automated software that sends emails with a script for changing contact and company names. Humor helps! For me, I’ve always had success with puns. If I pitch a moving company for a guest posting opportunity, I’ll add something like “I really think this post will hit home for your audience (Pun definitely intended!).”
   However, you do not want to be overly wordy and lengthy. An outreach email that, at first glance, seems like a chore to read will likely put someone off from reading it or even scanning it.
   
   Pro Tip – Your outreach emails should be able to be read easily and in under 90 seconds. For readability purposes, you can put any templates you have through Hemingway to ensure the reading level is generally between 6th and 9th grade. However, be mindful of who exactly you’re pitching. For example, if you pitch an editor at the Wall Street Journal, an outreach email with a higher reading level would probably be more likely to get a response.


4. Use proof of your past work – At first, you obviously won’t be able to do this, so you will have to go without it. But, as you go forward, you will get responses, and you will end up having your writing published on other sites of value, otherwise known as guest posts. Once you have a few quality ones that you feel do a good job of showcasing your ability, include a line in your email with 2 or 3 links to your very best ones. This serves as a bit of a resume with tangible proof, which will further help get responses.


5. Split test (A/B test) – Be sure that you do not just use just one template or approach to these outreach emails. At first, you will probably have several templates/approaches, of which you will be unsure which is best. Use them evenly across the list of contacts that you have assembled. Usually, one will be the clear winner in terms of performance based on KPIs like response rate. Move forward with that approach/template.


6. Be willing to go the extra mile and make that known – Make sure that your contacts know that you are willing to write thousands of words in a post for them. You should also make it known that you can get or make images or videos for the post. Let them know how willing you are to make requested edits and/or to add whatever they want. Be extremely clear about this.


7. Always Be Critiquing – Sometimes, what worked for months or even years might suddenly stop appealing to people for one reason or another. Sometimes certain approaches work better for different demographics. Overly wordy pitches could work perfectly for people of a certain age or gender, while simultaneously putting off people outside of those demo ranges. Always continue to tweak things, whether it be the subject lines, the content of the pitch, or even something as small as punctuation!

BONUS: Outreach templates!!!

Here are two templates for you to use. I advise you to make each template your own and only use it as a simple basis for your outreach efforts, but feel free to copy/paste and do a minimum amount of editing as well.

Guest posting backlinking outreach template

Hello FIRST NAME,

My name is YOUR FIRST NAME, and I’m reaching out to recommend a blog post that I think would really hit home (pun definitely intended) for some of the COMPANY NAME audience. I propose that I can help write, ghostwrite, or provide thorough quotes and/or expertise on USE YOUR OWN UNIQUE PITCH IDEA HERE BUT USE MY EXAMPLE AS INSPIRATION “How You Can Ship Your Car to a New Home During a Long-Distance Move” or something along those lines. I do not need credit or payment of any kind for the work.

I can detail the whole process of shipping your car to a new home during a move from start to finish. Some parts of the post could include: “Where exactly to ship your car to a new home” because some homes may be on streets where auto carrier trucks are too large to enter, “How far ahead to schedule your car shipment before you move to your new home” because it can get a bit complex to coordinate a move-in date with a drop-off date for your vehicle, “How you can easily prepare for your car shipment so you can focus on the rest of your move” and much more. I’m also extremely flexible and very open to whatever ideas you have or changes you might need.

A little more about me: I am the lead writer for the blog at RoadRunner Auto Transport which can be found at https://www.roadrunnerautotransport.com/news – I’ve been with the company for just over four years now.

Here are a couple of examples of work I’ve done in the past for other sites:

LIST AT LEAST TWO EXAMPLES OF GUEST POSTS THAT YOU’VE DONE FOR OTHER SITES IN THE PAST – OMIT THIS SECTION IF YOU DO NOT HAVE THAT

If you have any questions or concerns about any of this, please do not hesitate to reach out. You can email me at YOUR EMAIL ADDRESS or call me at YOUR PHONE NUMBER.

Thank you for your time – it is sincerely appreciated.

Have a great day!

–YOUR FIRST NAME

Resource list backlinking outreach template

Hello CONTACT’S FIRST NAME,

I was looking for some information on SUBJECT OF RESOURCE PAGE today when I came across your resource page at SPECIFIC WEBSITE ADDRESS WHERE LINKS/RESOURCES ARE LISTED

It was super helpful! Thank you.

It actually helped me find the information I needed for a blog post that I’m working on right now.

Anyway, this made me realize that our site could be a valuable resource for your audience.

The page provides all the information necessary to EXPLAIN WHY YOUR PAGE WOULD BE USEFUL TO LIST ON THEIR LINKS PAGE

You can see it here: URL TO THE PAGE YOU WANT THEM TO LINK TO

It might make a nice addition to the page.Anyway, thanks again for all the excellent info. And have an awesome week!

Talk Soon,

–YOUR FIRST NAME