Last updated on December 22nd, 2015
Let’s face it; link building is difficult work—especially if you’re using techniques that make you work harder than necessary. One such example is email outreach. Now don’t get me wrong, email outreach does work, but some people do not use it correctly. Here’s a better idea of how you should employ email outreach.
Scenario: you’ve decided to use email outreach for link building and have put in the time to organize your strategy, draft the perfect email message, and reach out to potential contacts. After receiving your response(s), you’ve been turned down, but now what do you do? Many make the mistake of giving up; however, you’re better off by responding to those that have turned you down and kindly question why.
If you’re lucky, you may get a response that can help you change your approach to email outreach, which can help you become more successful in the future. However, you need to make sure you approach this politely and offer not to approach them again.
Start at the Beginning
The first thing to do is to consider your proposal. You need to analyze it to discern whether your proposal will target who you are trying to reach properly. Be on the lookout for situations like:
- Your website not being relevant enough to their business (or site)
- Your proposal going against any part of their advertising policies
- The person you’re pitching to works with/for your competitor(s)
The individuals you have contacted are not likely to reply if you cannot tell them how your two sites (or businesses) are relevant to one another.
Brace Yourself for Rejection
Sometimes, regardless of how well you’ve done your job, you’ll be denied a link. Some of the most common excuses for not linking out include the following.
- Previous penalization by Google
This response is best left alone. Companies previously penalized lose money and become very protective of themselves. Chances are they’re saying that if they could, they’d give you a link.
- Your site doesn’t fit my readership
Sometimes this will just happen and rather than fight the webmaster, you should trust their judgment—after all, they know their readers better than you do. After getting this type of response, you should look at your proposal. Either you’ve written your proposal incorrectly, or their website really will not be a relevant resource.
- This is what I’m already doing or it’s direct competition
If you receive this kind of response, you really need to take a closer look at what content is already on their site. You won’t find anyone who’s going to link to content they already have, nor is someone link building for CVS going to approach Walgreens (or vice versa).
If you fail to put together a good proposal or learn from mistakes, you will not be very successful at link building. Moreover, failing to question where you went wrong can be detrimental. Between taking the time to learn from your mistakes and taking some cues from SEO-e, you can become masterful at link building through email outreach.