In this video I discuss:
- How to use the “done for you” template tool I linked in Lesson A1.5
- The premium tools you should use to cut out a lot of the tedious, time-consuming work (if you don’t want to do it manually)
- Why you should setup a separate Gmail account for outreach efforts
- How many contacts you should compile if you want to see decent results
- Discussing whether or not this very time-consuming process is worth it
Please direct all questions and requests for support to the FIMP Facebook group (free for registered members).
A1.6 Reaching Out to Get Backlinks (Skyscraper Method) Transcript Below
Okay!
So, you’ve put in all the tedious work to gather the list of contacts, and it’s just time to start outreach. I want to show you how to use the done-for-you template that I’ve put together, the spreadsheet, and the Microsoft Word document combined.
There are other ways to do it too, which I’ll show. But it’s important to realize that the trickiest part of this entire process has been taken care of for you.
For whatever reason, while I totally understand why a lot of people really struggle with writing these email templates and figuring out how to outreach correctly, that’s already knocked out for you. You have a professionally-written email template, you’re ready to rock, you’re ready to start getting backlinks.
At this point, of course, you should have your link magnet written, and you should have a list of highly-targeted prospects that you want links from.
It’s just a matter of gathering their name and email address to finish off that information and sending the emails.
When you’re sending the emails, you have 2 options here. I’ve set the system up so that you can do it free for as easily as possible. It’s tedious. My opinion is that: the premium subscriptions, depending on how much you’re spending on them because there’s a broad range, they’re very much worth the money because they save you a lot of tedious work.
I’m going to go over both options here.
I’ve designed this to be a free system for you – with the spreadsheet and the template (the outreach template you have). It will be the most tedious option, but it will also be free, which I know is important for a lot of people.
You would just use the provided Microsoft Word email template that’s already merged with the contacts list. So if you fill out that contacts list correctly, it should all move over. I’ll show you exactly what that looks like with the Microsoft Word template that I’ve created for you.
You would just go through each one of those previews and you would copy it, and you’d paste it over to your email, you’d hit send. Again, I’ll show what that looks like.
The other option is to use something like MailShake.com. I’ve used multiple services like this. I’ve used NinjaOutreach. There’s another one called PitchBox – that’s super expensive now, it’s like $300 a month. It’s an awesome software but it’s way overkill for what we’re doing here. There’s one called BuzzStream, that I want to say, they’re like $100 a month per user.
This changes fairly often. Two years ago, these guys were reasonably priced. I’ve done some research, and at the time I record this video, MailShake.com is only $20 a month per user. It may go up to $30 or $40 a month, then it’s still very much worth it.
Another one that I’ve used is Woodpecker.co. That’s another really good one. Just check those options and find the price point you like. I would say if they are still reasonably priced, MailShake.com or Woodpecker.co are the ones that I would recommend the most – just because they’re reasonably priced and they do what you need to do.
The cool thing about these is that you just import the same spreadsheet that I’ve given you access to, the template I’ve created for you. After you filled it out, you would just upload that spreadsheet and it’s going to do all of the hard work for you.
It’s going to automatically send follow-up emails. It’s also going to automatically send those follow-up emails as replies to the previous message, which is a pretty cool, little feature.
Whenever you’re going through it… I’ve written it so that you can manually do this as well. But if you’re using something like MailShake or Woodpecker, it’s going to automatically do a lot of that work for you and automatically send replies. So it looks much more natural, it looks like you’re replying to your original email. Which the more natural you can make these things look, the better your results are going to be.
One of the coolest things about these premium services is that you’re going to get metrics on how many people are opening your message, how many people have replied, how many of them have just bounced because you don’t have the right email address, etc.
I’d recommend MailShake but, also, you can do it manually. I think you’re going to find when you start doing it manually, that you really want to spend $20 a month to not do it manually anymore, but I wanted to give you the options.
Regardless of whatever method you use, if you’re doing it for free (which what I’m going to show), but also if you get on MailShake, it’s really easy to use their software. They always have really good training videos too.
Basically, you’ll just upload the spreadsheets and you say: “okay, this column is the email address, this column is the name.” And then you can also specify the custom columns that are in this template and say: “okay, in the email template, swap out here for the value in this column.” It functions the exact same way – the free set up I’ve given you, except it’s all automated, it all sends automatically, etc.
Regardless of whether you’re using free method or you’re using a premium service like MailShake or Woodpecker, set up a separate Gmail account. For the love of God, set up a separate Gmail account. Because what you can do if you’re not careful, it doesn’t happen if you’re not being really spammy, but you’re risking this Gmail account getting shut down.
If it’s not a Gmail account and it were on your own domain, you would be risking that your domain gets too much spam associated with the domain, and you start going in this people’s spam inbox.
When it comes to Gmail, you can just swap out to a different Gmail account if and when that ever happens. But in my experience, if you’re sending really well-written outreach templates, this isn’t really going to be an issue unless you’re just blasting way too much.
You really don’t want to send more than probably 25 or 30 of these emails everyday. Again, because if you start doing, like, 500 in a day, or even if you start doing 100 in a day, it starts to leave a pattern that can get you flagged for spam more quickly and lower your deliverability.
But again, the nice thing about a service like MailShake or Woodpecker is it automatically does that for you and it will stop sending those emails if your account gets limited because you’ve sent too many emails.
Again, it just cuts out a lot of the annoying fine details of doing it manually. But any way around it, whether you’re doing it manually or automatically, set up a separate Gmail account. Absolutely.
The other thing to remember is remember that the template is only as good as the information you put into it. If you’re just putting in a bunch of links that you look at the site and you’re just quickly pulling them and the site is a kind of site… you know like I looked at FeedBurner, I was like: “it’s going to be hard to get a link from these.” Even a couple that I’ve put on the list, it’s going to be hard to get a link from them. The most likely links that you’re going to get are individual bloggers, not companies.
That’s the majority the data you want in your spreadsheet. Of course, you still want it to be relevant, you still want them to be as high authority as possible, but the template is only as good as the information that you’re putting into it. That’s very important to remember.
You want to compile a list of at least 100 to 150 contacts, like I said, you can go more. If you get really sick and tired at 50 and you just say: “this is burning me out”, you can go less. But if you want to get a substantial amount of links, if you want to get at least 5 or 10 high-authority links – which there’s a lot to be said for that from this campaign, you probably want to compile at least 100 to 150 contacts.
Let’s take a quick look at this and then we’ll tie off this entire lesson here.
If we come in here, I wanted to show what this would look like if you just copied from the template that I’ve provided.
If we come in here, of course the first thing we need to do here really quickly is we need to come in and finish filling out this spreadsheet because we are missing the first name and email for the contact for a handful of these. We want to complete that really quickly.
You’re not always going to get good results out of this but we can put in the domain that we put in the spreadsheet, so we would just take this over to hunter.io. Again, with hunter.io, I think you get 100 free searches per month. So it’s limited unless you’re paying.
There are several different options here. For the sake of this video, I don’t want to bore you. What would probably be best if you were doing this yourself is to look some of these guys up and figure out who would be the best contact. Because it’s probably not Neil Patel, himself, he’s probably got a team member handling a lot of his content, and marketing efforts, and stuff like that – so that would be the right person to link out to.
hunter.io gives some really cool information here and just shows where they’ve pulled this information from.
I will say, again for the sake of this video and to not bore you, I’m just going to drop in Neil’s here. It looks like Neil’s is probably np@neilpatel.com. It looks like there’s also neil@neilpatel.com (20+ sources), we’ll pull this one instead. We’ll just pull this one over really quick so it’s neil@neilpatel.com.
Same thing with Brian Dean at Backlinko. We’ll just put in backlinko.com. It looks like brian@backlinko.com. Again, I would probably research if I were going to start sending these emails from this spreadsheet. This is just for teaching purposes. I would research who dmarc is. I would find out whether or not that’s the better contact, and I would reach out to him if I needed to.
We’ll come over here and do copy CopyBlogger. I would need to find out which one of these guys is the right contact for CopyBlogger. For now, we’ll just say it’s jerod@copyblogger.com. We would fill in the first name. I’m not going to keep doing these because it’s boring (I know), it’s monotonous (I know), but it’s what you have to do.
Once you you’ve filled out all this information, you have all of the contacts in here and you’ve filled it out fully, you want to save it.
If you’re doing this the free way, you want to open up the template. You’re going to get some notifications. You’ll get different notifications based on what form of Office you’re using, or all different kinds of things.
But you just want to click through the messages. I always get this message, I just click OK. And then it will pop this little dialog up here. This is already preset for you, so you don’t have to adjust anything. You just have to hit OK.
I have 2 messages in here. I have one message, and then another message that’s written to be sent 5 or 7 days later, maybe 3 or 5. You would play around with it, figure out what works for you.
What I’ve done here is I’ve done a mail merge in Microsoft Word that’s tied to that Excel spreadsheet where all the contacts are. If you want to see what this looks like, we can hit preview results and I can go right here. You can see now it reads:
Hello, Neil!
I was researching increasing traffic without SEO about an hour ago, and your article about increasing traffic without SEO was incredibly helpful!
I just wanted to take a minute to say thank you very much for putting it together…
You want to fill out your name here, and you want to fill out your resource here. You would not only do it in this message, but you also would do it if you’re using this free and you’re just copy-pasting over and over again, you would not only do it over here but you would also do it over here because we have the pasted reply over here.
My resource is right over here. 60 Ways to Promote Your Blog. So I’m going to label this 60 Free Ways to Promote Your Blog, and I could change that to website, whatever I wanted to do. Then I would insert the link.
Now this first message is ready to go, it’s all synced up with the mail merge. You’ll notice that these fields change depending on who it is. That’s the idea – is it’s a template.
You could just click through here and you’d say: “okay, this is the email to go to Ian.” So, you would copy, you’d come over to whatever mail client you were using, you’d paste in the message – it’s formatted in a way that it should paste over really, really well. We would pull the email from this spreadsheet. Like I said, it’s tedious, especially if you’re doing it for free.
We would pull the subject, which again is dynamic. This is dynamically updated, it’s part of the template. Pop that in there, and boom! You would just hit send. This is going to me, so I’ll hit send.
That’s it. You would do that over and over and over again.
Again, the better way to do it is definitely using a software to help you out. That takes a lot of this burden out and it will save you, literally, hours upon hours from this process. So it’s worth $20 to $40 a month, depending on who you’re working with, what site you’re working with.
I can’t recommend that highly enough. You can watch the demo here on MailShake’s site to see what they do.
You upload the same spreadsheets, and they’ll say: “okay, where is the name field? Where is the email field?” And you’d upload that spreadsheet, and then you would take this template in to MailShake and this template as well. You would just paste it in there and say: “okay, the article description field, I want it to be placed at this point in the email, here is the column in the spreadsheet”. And you would just match it up to this column in the spreadsheet.
For article topic, you would just match it up to that part of the spreadsheet. You can see them clearly labeled in the template. Article topic is article topic. Article description is in here a couple of times, but it’s article description. Article URL, I actually don’t have in here, but I have that information for reference and in case you wanted to work it in to your own template.
You can just adjust these for what works for you. You can tweak any of this. It’s a really good starting point. I think it gives you a really good head start, and that was my intention.
So, whether you’re doing it manually, which is tedious and time consuming, or you’re paying 20 or 40 bucks a month for the outreach software… and if you’re not using it, like if you’re just doing one round, just subscribe for a month and cancel and then come back a couple of months later when you want to go through this process. It’s not like you need to keep that subscription recurring.
That’s how you do it. That’s how you do that. Hopefully, it’s all really clear in your mind. Once you start doing this, it is totally, totally, totally worth it.
I want to tie off here and conclude this section. You’re probably seeing this and going: “Holy crap! That’s a lot of work!” It seems really tedious it seems really time consuming.
Gathering the information is tedious enough. And then, if you’re not paying for a premium subscription, just send each one of those emails individually. And then a few days later, just send each one of those follow ups individually.
Even just doing 25 of them or 30 of them a day, it gets really tedious and you’ve got to be asking yourself: “Is all of this worth it?!”
The answer to that question is absolutely! This is going to take somewhere between 2 and 4 weeks for you to do all of this. If you’re working 15 or 20 hours a week, it’s understandable that it’s going to take you some time. Set that expectation.
This isn’t something you’re going to knock out in a whole week. Even if you were working 40 hours a week, this might take you towards a full week, if not bleeding into the second week for you to do all of this.
You have to think about the payoff. If you email 100 or 150 people, and even if you only get 4 or 5 really high-authority links, we’re talking about something done in the span of a couple of weeks or a month that would typically take (especially in new website) a year, a year and a half.
I mean, you were cutting out a dramatic part of your growth cycle. It is a very good way to fast track and a way to growth hack authority quicker than you ever would have, otherwise.
The other thing to keep in mind is after you’ve done this link building campaign, and you’ve gotten the links from these guys, don’t forget to go back into that article that now has… it should have a decent amount of authority even if it has only gotten 5, or, 7, or 10 really high-authority backlinks.
Add some internal links to other articles in your site that you want to boost the rankings for because once that page on your site has high-authority, you can then… in the industry, it’s called “passing the link juice”.
It’s got all of this link juice coming to it from high-authority websites, then you want to sprinkle in maybe 2 or 3 links throughout that article to other pages on your site, which will help that link juice, that authority trickle down to those pages as well – which is why internal linking is important.
Don’t forget to do that because it’s the way you get the most ROI out of your efforts here. You may be saying there’s no way I can continue writing 2 or 3 articles per week, or even 1 really high-quality article per week if I’m taking on these efforts too.
Once you’ve gotten your site to the point where it’s established, it doesn’t look bare anymore, it’s totally okay to produce less content and spend more time promoting and getting backlinks like this. It’s still a very effective, I would say an even more effective strategy.
Yes, it’s tedious. Yes, it’s frustrating. Ideally, again, as quickly as possible, you would hand this off to a virtual assistant that’s going to do a lot of the link gathering and stuff like that.
Because at the end of the day, that’s something you can train someone to do really easily. It’s not really what we would consider “skilled labor”. Anyone can go and find these pages with the tools, as long as you teach them how to do it.
You want to get those things off your plate as quickly as possible, so you can focus on the things that only you do and that have really, really high ROI. But it’s okay, in the mean time, to take a step back from creating content to do this.
It may feel slow going at first, but the payoff is huge. Again, you’re getting high-authority links that would take months, if not years to come across otherwise, and you’re spurring that quicker, you’re shortcutting your way to getting those links.
Just like anything else, stick with it. Try it for a while. You’re going to get better over time. You’re probably not going to kill it the first time around, you’re not going to do incredibly well even with the done-for-you templates, but you should see results.
As long as you stick with it, you’ll start to see tremendous results from something like this.
That concludes the Skyscraper technique. Again, there are other backlinking strategies that work very similarly. You could even use the same link magnet that you’ve already created, you would just do research and compile the list of people you want to reach out to, you would also edit the template.
As far as I’m concerned, this is the most powerful link building technique to build really highly relevant and really high-authority backlinks. By far, it’s the most powerful white hat backlinking strategy.
I strongly recommend you leverage it if at all possible. Like I said, I know it can be intimidating, I know it can be tedious, but once you do it one time, or you do it a second time, you’re going to notice: “okay, I’m getting really good at this. I’m settling into a flow”, and the return on investment can be tremendous.
In time, we’ll dig into some of the other methods, but even if this is all you did, as far as building white hat backlinks, it should be enough. This is really, really powerful stuff. I don’t want to belabor the point too much, but I also want to really emphasize how valuable and how powerful this technique is.
If you’re interested in getting results twice as quick, or three times as quickly as you would have if you were just pumping out content non-stop, this is how you do it, this is where you should be focusing your efforts.
That’s that. As always, if you have any questions, feel free to post them to the Facebook group. Thank you so much for being a FIMP supporter. I can’t tell you how much I sincerely appreciate that.
If you have any questions, I’ll keep an eye out for them in the Facebook group, or I’ll just see you in the next training series!
Talk to you soon!