Hey, it's Sam Oh and welcome to Ahrefs'
advanced course on link building. Now, there are a lot of ways to interpret
the word "advanced," so let's walk through what you'll learn, what you won't learn, and
I'll give you a breakdown of the course. A course is designed to help you break
away from traditional link building tactics that everyone is doing and improve your
processes to create a highly effective link building team. You'll learn how to find prospects with what
I call the "seed and lookalike" approach, craft personalized and benefit-rich outreach
emails, and you'll learn how to validate your link building campaigns with minimal
efforts using a process called a "blitz list." On top of that, I'll show you how to structure
your team and manage it to maximize your efficiency and scale your
link building operations. Now, we won’t spend any time talking about
common link building tactics like guest posting, or resource page link building. We already have in-depth tutorials on these
tactics on our YouTube channel and blog. Instead, we'll be peeling back the layers
of the stages of link building to make your efforts more efficient and effective. Let's jump into the first lesson which is
on the role of content in link building. Now, the reason why I want to explore this
first is because content and link building are inseparable. And while many get this in theory,
they don't put it into practice. Let me paint a picture for you
that I see time and time again. So, people will often start with keyword research. They'll research subtopics and create content
hubs because structure is important. They'll hit the Publish button
and then be like… "Oh yeah, we're going to need
links to rank for these topics." So they look at who's linking to the top-
ranking pages for their main topics. Then they export backlink profiles, filter
prospects by metrics, and then do some sort of shotgun approach where they send
a gazillion emails hoping for a 0.5% link acquisition rate. Then to excuse themselves from blatantly
spamming the population of a small town, they say… "Link building is a numbers game. You
just gotta keep on sending those emails." Now, assuming you're not paying for links or
doing link exchanges at scale, your content should dictate your outreach pitches. Your content is actually what gives you a
good reason to contact someone and ask for a link. It sets context for your first conversation
around a common interest or belief. Now, quick disclaimer: I'm not saying that
link building is not a numbers game. But I don't think we should be bragging about
0.5% link acquisition rates because it doesn't have to be this painful or spammy. And I'm not saying that paying for links
or doing link exchanges are ineffective. These are just blatantly against Google's
terms of service and we don't practice that at Ahrefs. Plus, on a personal note, the harder link
building gets, the more I love the game. Alright, now let's dig a bit deeper
into the content aspect. Your content type matters
in terms of success rates. As a very general rule of thumb, informational
content like how-tos, tutorials and data studies are going to be easier to get links to than
product pages, affiliate posts, or anything commercial for that matter. Why? Because there are a lot more opportunities
to bake "value" into informational content. And again, "value" should be
tied to your pitch angles. Whereas commercial content is tougher
to insert value, specifically for things like product pages, where the only real beneficiary
of "value" is the recipient of the link. Now, because this is only meant to be
a foundational lesson, I won't expand on baking value into informational content right
now, because first, we need to understand why people link to pages. Actually, seeing as a link is essentially
an author sharing information through their website with web visitors, it's
easiest if we ask ourselves… "why do people share the things they share?" So as an example, a friend might share the
latest news article or recipe because they recently had a conversation about it. Parents share things with kids to sometimes
pass down nuggets of wisdom. Kids often share things with parents
seeking wisdom or expressing a complaint. In all of these examples, there's a relationship. Now, if we put this in the context of link
building, why does an author share another person's page via. a hyperlink with their
readers who are mostly anonymous strangers? And while there's no set list of reasons,
here are some common ones. #1. They link to pages to reference
or support their point. Statistics are probably the most common. For example, if we look at the anchors report
for our SEO statistics page, you'll see that nearly all of our links are a result of
specific stats that were mentioned. #2. They reference something they
don't need or want to expand on. For example, teamwork.com wrote this
guide on SEO project management. And under the heading "What is SEO project
management," they say, "An SEO campaign encompasses various tasks such as technical
SEO, a content audit, keyword research, etc. And for each area of SEO, they've linked to
a guide, including our post on keyword research. For a topic like SEO project management, there's
no point in expanding on these techniques because it's easier to direct readers to a place
where they can learn more if they want to. #3. It makes them look good. People often link to things like high profile
mentions because it helps them build credibility and social proof with visitors. For example, this site has an "in the press"
page where most links are from listicles on things they value and/or make them look good. So things like "best gift sets" is saying,
"See, our product is awesome". Or "Top native owned businesses" tells
us a bit about their values and roots. In fact, creating pages that mention and portray
a person or company in a positive way is a link building tactic on its own, often
referred to as ego bait. Basically, SEOs create content like this where
they mention influential people which often "baits" people into linking to them. It doesn't always work for mega lists, but
it has worked exceptionally well for Inc's list of the Inc 5000. Inc. Magazine publishes a list of the
top 5000 most successful companies in the US annually. And as a result, they earn hundreds or
even thousands of links every single year. And if we look at the backlinks for their
2021 list, you'll see that tons of these links are from homepages where companies
are showing off their award. And the fourth reason is that there's a
relationship whether it's explicit or implicit. Implicit relationships are usually
content super fans. And while it's tough to build a content fan
base, they're super effective in link building because they trust what's written on
a site without a shadow of a doubt. When they guest post, they
frequently link to you. When they go on podcast interviews, they
frequently mention your content which often gets linked to in show notes. Explicit relationships on the other hand are
your online friends who you talk shop with. And what often creates these professional
relationships is respect and admiration for each other's work. As a result, you want to link to each others'
content whether that's on your own site or on other people's sites. This is one of the most powerful link building
advantages you can have because the bottomline is that you want to help each other succeed. Now, a few commonalities with most of these
reasons are a) people link to things to prove that they're not making stuff up, b) they
link to things to add credibility to themselves or their companies, or c) they
link to things they trust. These are 3 main things you need to consider
when you're reaching out for links. Because if you go in with your own agenda
to satisfy your needs and only your needs, then your intentions will be quite clear. And your chances of getting a link
without paying for it, will be very slim. Now, this might seem all meta and unfortunately,
knowing why people link usually won't be enough to get you links. It's just foundational for your outreach pitches. And this list is far from exhaustive. You need to dig into the data. And the best place to start is by analyzing
how similar pages got their links. Because by understanding the "how," you're
able to infer the "why" which also helps to form your angles of attack for
your link outreach pitches. So in the next lesson, we're going to talk
about competitor analysis, specifically analyzing how similar pages got their links. In this lesson, we're going to talk about
how to research a page's backlinks to understand how they were built or earned. And this is a super important skill to have
because if you understand how a page got its links, then you'll have direction in
terms of how to replicate that link profile. And of course, we'll go through
some examples in this lesson. Alright, so the first thing we need to do
is find a competing page to analyze. Now, if your page is targeting a topic with
the intent to rank, a good place to start finding competitors are the top 10
ranking pages for your target query. Afterall, backlinks are likely a reason for
their high ranking position, especially if it's a competitive non-local,
non-freshness-dependent query. For example, at Ahrefs, we obviously want
to rank high for queries like "link building" because our tools are essential for this process. Now, if we look at the SERP overview table in
Keywords Explorer for that query, you'll see that similar guides from Moz and Backlinko
have a lot more referring domains than us, which is likely the primary reason
they rank ahead of our page. So these are two link profiles I'd
definitely want to check out. Now, to see the backlink profiles, just click
on the number in the backlinks column and you'll be able to see the pages
that link to these competing guides. We'll circle back to this in a bit because you
won't always be building links to pages that target a keyword. For example, topics for linkable assets
often have no search volume, but they have the potential to earn massive
amounts of links because of their appeal. And then SEOs will add internal links from
these pages to more commercial pages, passing PageRank. Now, if you're working on a linkable asset,
chances are you fall into 1 of 2 categories. Category 1: you were inspired from another
page that's generated a ton of links and you want to create a similar page. If that's the case, then you already know
the URL of your competing page. So just throw it into a competitor analysis
tool like Site Explorer, hit the Backlinks report and you're in the same place
as we were for our previous example. Now, if you're in category 2, you know
you want to create a linkable asset, but you don't know the exact
angle you'll be going with. If this is the case, then you can use
a tool like Ahrefs' Content Explorer where you can search through billions
of pages and get SEO metrics on them. For example, if you have a personal finance
site, you can start with a broad search like "personal finance." Next, I'll set a referring domains filter to narrow in
on pages that have at least 100 referring domains. And to filter out a lot of low-quality
results, I'll exclude subdomains. As a final measure, I'll actually set a page
traffic filter to only show pages that have a maximum value of 1,000 organic visits. Meaning, we don't want to see pages that get
a ton of search traffic because these are likely ones that you've discovered through keyword
research and would fall into the first example of pages with the intent to rank
for a popular query. Now, from here, you just need to skim
through the results and look for topics that might inspire you. And I know that "finding inspiration" sounds
kind of cliché, but this is where your expertise and creativity will guide you to your idea. For example, this page from Opensecrets.org
has collected over 800 referring domains. And as you can see from the description,
it's a page about the personal finances and net worth of members of Congress. And if we actually click through to that page,
you'll see that it's basically just a curation of congress members and their estimated wealth. Now, I won't dig too deep into this, but I will
make a couple of points to support why this could be a good competing page to analyze. #1. We already know they have
tons of referring domains. #2. Their data is around four years old as
the article was published in October 2017 and doesn't appear to have been updated. And #3. US politics and especially wealth
inequality, have become more prominent topics since the money printers
went crazy in 2020. Alright, so now that we have a potential
competing page to analyze, I'll click on the caret and then go to the Backlinks
report to get to where we need to be. Ok, so we've found two backlink
profiles to analyze. Let's look at one of the competing
guides on link building first. Now remember, our objective is to understand
how these targets got their backlinks to see if we can replicate similar links. And in order to do that, you first need to
understand the context of those links. Meaning, what are these referring pages talking
about and why do they need to link to this target? So the first place you'll want to look in this
report is the anchors and target URL column. Now, as you can see, this page has thousands
of links which will be tough to filter through. So with big link profiles, I actually prefer
to start at the Anchors report because it summarizes the backlink profile nicely. So what I'm looking for are specific points
that are frequently mentioned because this is usually a sign of a ‘linkable point.' In other words, if lots of referring domains
are linking to the guide with the same anchor, then that point likely resonated
with readers and the linkerati. So these are the things that I'd
look to replicate in our content. Now, looking at this Anchors report, I'd generally
ignore things like the title of the post, naked URLs, and branded anchors because these
are less likely to be replicable. So for this page, something that stands out
is "The Most Creative Link Building Post Ever," and seeing as it's title cased, it likely means
that there was a redirect that happened at some point when the article had a different
title because that's not the title today. And if we click to see the links to the target,
you'll see that it was indeed from a redirect from the acquisition of Point Blank SEO. Now, that page is responsible
for over 130 referring domains. Meaning, the 130 websites that are linking
to this guide through a redirect are likely irrelevant today. So there's an opportunity for an outreach
angle and prospects to back it. Now, if we continue scrolling through
the anchors, you'll see this one that says "Download ebook." And if we look at the links to the target,
it is indeed going to the original guide. But if you look at the actual page itself,
there's no mention of an ebook or to download anything. So these are also irrelevant links and we
could technically package up our post in a downloadable ebook pretty easily. Let's dig deeper. If I click on that anchor, it'll open the
backlinks report with some filters set. And you'll see that there are only a few decent
sites within this small list of prospects. So you might conclude that it's not worth
turning our guide into an ebook for a maximum of 3 links, right? Not necessarily. A commonality among these pages is that
they're all list posts on free SEO ebooks. So as a link builder, you need to follow
the rabbit hole to see if there's a bigger opportunity here. So I'll go to Ahrefs' Content Explorer and
search for "seo ebook" in the search box and I'll set the mode to a Title search. Now, seeing as we won't want to pitch
the same website multiple times, I'll set the One page per domain filter. From here, I'll set a couple metric filters like
a minimum DR of 20 and a minimum website traffic of 1,000. And now we're left with over 300 link
prospects to filter through. Not bad. But if we wanted to expand this list, all
we need to do is change the word "seo" to something like "marketing." And now you have nearly 1500 more prospects. So is it worth creating a link building ebook? It's probably worth a shot. And we'll build onto this example
throughout the course. Alright, now let's look at the second
example which was a link-baity post on the wealth of congress members. To jog your memory, the data from the post
is from 2017 to 2018, meaning, it's pretty outdated today. So if we were to create a similar page, we'd
want to create something with up to date data. Now, because we know that content and links
are inseparable as I had shared in the previous lesson, we need to figure out which parts of
the content are attributable to the backlinks. So we're going to be looking
for linkable points. Because this page has a ton of links pointing
to it, I'm going to go to the anchors report as a starting point. And again, I'll ignore things like naked URLs
and branded anchors as it's generally tough to replicate these unless it's on listicles
like "best [product type]" i.e. "best SEO tools." Now, if we look at the first anchor,
you'll see that it has something to do with financial disclosure forms. And if we look at the actual links, you'll
see that probably all of them are from content syndications, seeing as the date
of publishing is pretty much the same for all links. Plus the anchors and surrounding
texts are identical. So we need to ask ourselves, based on
this point, can we replicate these links? Well, in order to do that, you'd need a big
news publication to write a story and link to your page. Then other publications would need to syndicate
that content – and no guarantees there. You'd basically need to carefully plan
and execute a successful PR campaign. So in my opinion, it's not easily replicable. But as you continue to scroll through the
report, one interesting thing that stands out for me are a lot of links that
include a dollar figure amount: "five members worth $100 million or
more," "$79 million," "$148.4 million," and "$251 million" to name a few. So, I'll go to the Backlinks report and I'll
enter the dollar sign in the search box. Then, I'll set the filter to search in
the anchors with surrounding text. And now we have a list of
around 50 link prospects. Let's dig a bit deeper. The first backlink is anchored
on US Rep Darrell Issa. But his name isn't on the page. The same goes for this one on Scott Peters. Now, if you continue to dig through the reasons
for these links, you'll find that a bunch of the people mentioned are actually not on the page. And for those that are, their net worth has
likely changed over the past few years. So with these things in mind, if I were to
create a post on this topic, I'd probably include wealth estimations on both
current and past members of congress. I'd dig up as many financial disclosure forms as
I could find on each person and link them up. And design and UX would probably be a top
priority to make this information searchable and easy to digest. Now, would this work to generate a ton of links? No one really knows. And that's the thing about link building. We need to make informed decisions
based on a blend of data, creativity, and some common sense. And by ensuring that your content supports
both your link outreach pitches and the reason why people link to a page, you'll increase your
chances of having more successful campaigns. And we'll wrap things up here because in
the next module, we're going to be talking about link prospecting and how
you can do it efficiently for scale. And no, I'm not talking about
spamming random people. I'll see you in the next module. Hey, it's Sam Oh and welcome to the second
module which is all about link prospecting. Now, I've structured this module in three
lessons where each lesson represents a step in creating personalized and
scalable link building campaigns. Step 1 is to find your seed prospects,
which is what this lesson is all about. Step 2 is to find lookalike prospects based
on your seeds, which will broaden the scope of your link building campaign. And step 3 is to segment your prospects
which will help you scale your campaigns in a personalized way. So let's get started with finding seed prospects. Seed prospects are simply people who
link to a page for a specific reason. For example, did they link because of a specific
point that was made in the content, is it because they like the brand, or was it something else? Now, finding seed prospects is important
because it'll do two things for you. #1. You'll understand why
people are linking to a page, and #2. Because you know why, you'll know
how to approach them in your outreach pitch. And we'll get into some examples in a bit. Now, the most important skill for a prospector
to have when it comes to finding seed prospects is the ability to identify patterns. And by pattern, I'm referring to common
reasons for linking or a commonality among linking pages. Now, we've already gone through a couple
of examples in the previous module, but I want to talk about how you can
find opportunities for your own site. And it's really just about looking for patterns
in three places when analyzing a competing page's link profile. And these places are: The context of the backlinks, which help you
understand why people are linking to a page. And we'll specifically be looking
at anchors and surrounding text. The referring pages' titles which tells you
where their links are coming from and/or the types of pages they're coming from. And the actual content, which tells you
what your email pitch will be based on. So let's start off by looking at the
context of links to a competing page. Just as I showed you in lesson 1.2., studying
the anchors of a competing page's backlinks can help you understand why
people linked to a page. And these "whys" can often be
considered as "linkable points." For example, when we created our SEO stats
page, we looked at the anchors profile for top ranking pages. And we immediately noticed that the majority
of links were attributable to specific stats that were mentioned. This is a pattern. Now, if we click on the 93% anchor, it'll open
up the backlinks report with that anchor set in the filters. And as you can see, the context of the
link is "93% of online experiences begin with a search engine." Now, this stat alone doesn't
help with a pitch angle. You have to look for a pitch angle
that's related to the stat. And it was pretty easy for us to come up
with one because if you click through to that page, you'll see that 93%
isn't even mentioned on it. Plus, the stat was around a decade old,
meaning it's completely irrelevant today because the way we use
the internet has changed a lot. So as a pitch angle, we could say something
like, "hey, you mentioned this stat, but where did you get it from? The page you're linking to doesn't say that. Plus, recent stats show that 68% of online
experiences begin with a search engine." Blah blah blah. Alright, let's move on to the second place
to look and that's the referring page titles of a competing page's backlinks. In the previous module, we discovered some
pages that are linking to a link building guide. And the reason for them linking is because
that guide used to have an ebook. So as you can see from the anchors,
the linking pages are saying to go and download an ebook. Now, seeing as there's really only a few
good linking pages, it wouldn't be worth creating an ebook to maybe get a few links. We need to look for a commonality that can
potentially expand our pool of prospects. And that commonality is in
the titles of referring pages. As you can see, all of the titles
are listicles on free SEO ebooks. So our seed prospects are
listicles on SEO ebooks. As for the pitch angle, we can simply pitch
a free ebook without any kind of opt-in, which many of their recommendations use. Not a great benefit packed pitch,
but it's a good starting point. Alright, the third place to look for
patterns is the actual content itself. And the easiest thing you can
look for is incorrect, dangerous, or outdated recommendations. Now, this one is quite situational but
nevertheless, it's something worth paying attention to because
it works pretty well. I'll give you an example in the SEO industry. So this page on LSI keywords
has over 500 referring domains. But there's no such thing as LSI keywords. LSI stands for latent semantic indexing and
in short, it's an indexing method and has nothing to do with keywords. Now, today, this page explains that
LSI keywords aren't really a thing. But when it was first published, it was
a full blown guide on how to use these quote unquote "LSI keywords." Meaning, everyone who linked to the page prior to
the update was linking to inaccurate information. So our seed prospects are anyone who's
linking to this guide, prior to it being updated. Or anyone who's recommending
their readers to use "LSI Keywords." As for the pitch, we could just tell them that
there's no such thing as LSI keywords and recommend our content which explains what LSI
is, how it actually works, and also mention that we talk about whether using related words,
phrases, and entities actually helps to rank higher in Google – meaning, we address the
reason why they recommended using these so-called, "LSI keywords" in the first place. Now, these are just a few places to
look that can help surface some unique prospecting opportunities. But you don't need to limit yourself to these
because then you're stuck in the box of Sam. The point of this lesson is to show you
how finding a pattern or footprint that has a pitch angle baked into it can be the
foundation for link outreach campaigns. This is a skill that I highly recommend
working on because it's what you'll need to find seed prospects. From there, it's just about following
that footprint to find more prospects like your seeds. And in the next lesson, we're going to talk about
using your seeds to expand your list of prospects as well as the tools you can use. In this lesson, we're going to talk about
how to grow your list of prospects with "lookalike prospects." And the name "lookalike prospects" is
inspired by lookalike audiences which is commonly used in online advertising. Now, if you're unfamiliar with lookalike audiences,
ad platforms like Google and Facebook let you target people who are similar
to an existing audience. For example, people that are like
your customers or website visitors. And by targeting these lookalike audiences,
you're able to reach new people who are likely to be interested in your business because
they share similar characteristics to your existing customers or website visitors. Now, lookalike prospects in link
building are very much the same. You're trying to find people who are similar
to a seed prospect – which is something we covered in the previous lesson. But as a refresher, seed prospects are people
who link to a page for a specific reason. And these specific reasons are what I call
"linkable points," which are usually identified by patterns in a competing page's link profile. Best of all, these linkable points
help us define our pitch angles. Now, if this went over your head, then
I highly recommend watching lesson 2.1. on finding seed prospects so you can
get the most value from this lesson. Alright so there are 3 tools I use
to find lookalike prospects. The first is Ahrefs. More specifically, Ahrefs Site Explorer, Content
Explorer, SEO toolbar, and batch analysis. The second tool is Google and the third
is the Scraper Chrome Extension. With that said, let's go through some examples
of finding lookalike prospects based on a seed. And we'll continue with the examples
we discussed in the previous lesson. Alright, the first example is
for our SEO statistics page. When we were creating this page, we analyzed
a competing page's anchors report in Ahrefs Site Explorer. And we noticed a pattern that the majority of
links to this page were because of a specific stat. Now, when we went to visit these competing
pages, we noticed that a lot of the stats that were in the anchors report weren't even on
the page or they were just super outdated. So we had a couple pitch angles to run with. Now, usually when you find these patterns
or linkable points in a competitor's backlink profile, you'll likely want to get an understanding
of the breadth of the opportunity. And this will help you gauge whether it'll
be worth your time and effort to pursue it. The easiest way to do that is to look
for a footprint within the pattern. And a footprint is just a common
mark among a dataset. So in this case, the footprint
would be the percent sign. Now, with footprint in hand, we can
go to the backlinks report and use the filters to narrow in on
relevant opportunities. And because our footprint is a percent sign in
the anchor or surrounding text of the backlink, I'll type that into the search box and
choose anchors with surrounding text as the search mode. And as you can see, there are around 1,800
pages from unique websites that link to this page because of a specific stat. That's a pretty nice opportunity in my opinion. Now, we didn't stop here. We also looked at other anchors profiles for
other top ranking pages that had a significant number of referring domains. And we basically just did the exact same
thing and found well over 3,000 lookalike prospects to our seed. Alright the next example was when we found
an opportunity for our link building guide. What we noticed was that a competing page
was getting backlinks because they used to have a downloadable ebook
in their link building guide. And like the previous example, there was no CTA
or mention of a downloadable ebook on the page. Now, the pattern I noticed is that all of
the referring pages are on the topic of "top seo ebooks." So that means our seed prospects are people
who have a listicle on the top SEO ebooks. So what we need to search for are titles of
pages that include the word "best or top," which implies a listicle and "seo ebooks,"
which implies the main topic. So to find our lookalike prospects, we can use
Google search or Ahrefs' Content Explorer. In Google search, you can type in something
like intitle:best intitle:seo intitle:ebook. And we're left with a few hundred results. Now, you can enable Ahrefs' SEO toolbar to get
both domain and page level metrics on the results. And if you prefer to work in Excel or Sheets,
you can export the SERP as needed. But this job is much easier if you
use Ahrefs' Content Explorer. So I'll search for "best OR top" within
parentheses, and then SEO ebook. Finally, I'll change the search
mode to Title and run the search. And now you can see a few hundred
results along with their SEO metrics. And this report is also filterable
and exportable too. Now, if you want to further expand your
list of lookalike prospects, you can simply change the word "SEO" to something like
marketing since link building is a smaller part of the broader marketing category. And now we have well over 1,000
prospects in total for this campaign. Alright, the final seed we talked about
was for our page that debunks myths behind so-called "LSI keywords." Now, we established that our seed prospect is
any page that recommends using LSI keywords, because there's no such
thing as LSI keywords. And while there were a few hundred prospects
in the link profile we looked at in lesson 2.1, we can easily find a bigger list of lookalike
prospects using Content Explorer. So this time, I'm going to search for "use LSI
keywords" as a phrase match, which should surface pages where authors are recommending
visitors to use so-called LSI keywords. And now we have thousands of prospects
who've said this phrase on their page. So it would just be a matter of vetting these
pages and we'll get into this in the next module. Now, these are just a few methods that I
would use to find lookalike prospects for these hypothetical campaigns. And while there are other ways to generate
similar results, I won't bother going into them because the most important part
of this exercise is to understand how seed prospects help to broaden the scope
of your campaign with lookalike prospects. Now, there's one more technique to finding
lookalike prospects I want to talk about. And it's not so much about finding them
necessarily, but it's an efficient technique that I find myself using pretty frequently. And that's scraping. There are going to be times when
you're browsing the web and you notice a potential seed that's worth exploring. For example, I was looking for ways to build links
to our SEO course landing page in Ahrefs Academy. And I went through the usual routine of analyzing
the backlink profiles of competing pages. Now, this was all well and good, but then
I happened to find another low-hanging opportunity that none of our organic
search competitors would be able to do. And I discovered it in YouTube analytics. I realized that our SEO course videos had
gotten over a million views in less than a year. So I was like… man… I'm sure someone has
linked to these videos or embedded it in their posts at some point. Meaning, these are warm prospects who
I could reach out to and ask to link to our academy instead. Basically, my idea followed a similar concept
to unlinked mentions, which usually has a pretty high conversion rate for us. So I ran the video URL in Ahrefs' Site Explorer,
and sure enough, this video had collected a ton of referring domains. And I also checked the embed URL
for this same video in Site Explorer. And there were even more referring
domains to sort through. So our seed prospect for this hypothetical
campaign is anyone linking to one of our SEO course videos on our YouTube channel. Or anyone that's embedded
the video on their page. Now, because there's a total of 15 videos
of this course on our YouTube channel, I needed to get all of the URLs so I can run
them through a tool like Ahrefs' Batch Analysis. And to do that, I used
the Chrome Scraper Extension. All you need to do is right click on
the information you want to scrape and click "Scrape similar." From here, I modified the Xpath code a bit
and within seconds, we had a full list of URLs ready to batch analyze. Finally, I ran the URLs through Ahrefs' Batch
Analysis, sorted by Referring Domains, and I could instantly see that we had
a huge list of lookalike prospects that might be willing to
link to our academy page. As you can see, finding lookalike prospects is
all about finding a footprint within your seed and following the rabbit hole. And when you have a general scope of
the breadth of the campaign, you're able to get an idea if actually running the campaign
will be worth your time and effort. Now, when you're dealing with thousands of
potential link prospects with multiple seeds, it can get quite messy. Plus, sending personalized
emails at scale is tough. And that's where segmenting your link
prospects is going to help you stay organized, convert more emails into links
and save you a ton of time. So in the next lesson, we're going to talk
about how you can effectively segment your prospects so you can scale
personalized outreach campaigns. In this lesson, we're going to talk about
segmenting your link prospects so you can send personalized emails at scale. And we'll basically be putting together
the pieces from lesson 2.1 on finding seed prospects, and lesson 2.2
on finding lookalike prospects. So if you haven't watched those yet, then I highly
recommend doing that before you continue. Now, I want to clarify what I
mean by "personalized emails." In my opinion, good personalized emails
are ones where the context of your pitch is relevant to something specific they've done
or said, or something that's important to them. For example, if you wanted to get a link from a
page on budgeting, saying something like this wouldn't be personalized in my books. "Hey Mitch, I read your post
on budgeting methods. I have a page on credit cards and
how it can help people budget. Link to me." All this shows is that you've extracted
the main topic from the title. On the other hand, if you were
to say something like… "Hey Mitch, I saw that you're recommending
the 50/30/20 rule in your budgeting guide. Not sure if you're actually using this method for
budgeting, but I tried it and it absolutely sucked. I found it to be flawed because of [this]. So I created a new budgeting method
called the 90/5/5 rule which does [that]. My personal savings have gone up by 47%
in the last year and should only compound going forward. Would love to get your feedback and
perhaps a mention in your post if you dig it?" The context of the pitch, "feedback and a
mention" aka. a link, is relevant to something that they've said – and that's recommending
the 50/30/20 budget rule. Now, this lesson is not about outreach pitches
– we'll get into that in a later module. The key takeaway from these examples
is that linkable points a.k.a the things that reveal your seed prospects, naturally
make your outreach emails personalized. And because lookalike prospects are basically
mirrors of your seeds, you can send almost the exact same email while maintaining
the personalization factor, enabling you to scale your outreach campaigns. Now, to do it efficiently, all you need to
do is group your prospects by segment. And each segment will get its own unique email. This, in my opinion, is a much better way to
segment your link prospects compared to more common techniques based on metric groupings. Let's run through an example of how
we did this for our SEO stats page. As I mentioned in previous lessons, when
we were creating our SEO statistics page, we looked at the anchors report of competing
pages and noticed that the majority of links were attributable to a specific stat. For example, you'll see that the stat, 93%,
which is in the context of online experiences, has led to hundreds of referring domains. But when we went to the page, there
wasn't even a mention of that stat on it. So we did some research and found a more recent
stat and added that to our content – 68% of online experiences begin with a search engine. Now, by including this stat in our post,
we could send a relevant pitch like: "Hey, you're mentioning this 93% stat
but it's not on the page you're linking to. Plus, that's super outdated anyway. More recent research shows that 68% of online
experiences begin with a search engine." So with that solidified, we just needed to find
lookalike prospects that mention the old stat, "93% of online experiences
begin with a search engine." To do that, we went to the Backlinks report
and set the include filter to show backlinks that mention "93" in the anchor or
surrounding text of backlinks. And just like that, we had a segment of over 800
prospects we could send virtually the same email to while keeping it personalized. Then we did the same thing for the next stat. And if we added that stat to our page,
we would create another segment for our outreach campaign. And within an hour or so, our segments
looked like this, where the stat column represents the segment, and the number
of referring domains represents the size of the opportunity. Now, let's say that the number of links you
got wasn't enough to take pole position. How would you continue to find
new lookalike prospects? Well, you could look for more seeds
and lookalikes, or you can automate prospecting with your existing seeds with
Ahrefs' mentions or Backlinks Alerts. You can set up a backlinks alert with
a competing URL and get notified when that page gets new links. But for link prospecting, I find mentions
alerts to be much more effective. Ahrefs' Mentions alerts actually uses
the same database as Content Explorer. So all you would need to do is set your
search query to a footprint like "93% of online experiences" and set some
base-level metrics filters. Now, anytime someone mentions that on
a page and our crawler discovers it, you'll get notified via. email at your set interval and
you can quickly reach out and ask for a link. This, my friends, is the power of segmentation. And I may sound like that monkey who won't
stop banging on the cymbals, but I really want to bring emphasis on the importance
of these 3 steps in link prospecting. Finding good seed prospects helps you to
carefully craft your content and define your pitch angles. Finding lookalike prospects helps you to
create a sizable and relevant list of prospects. And segmentation helps you
to scale personalized emails. Everything is connected. Now, when we had a list of well over
a thousand link prospects, we didn't just blindly email everyone
who said a specific stat. There's a process to choose who you should
contact and that happens in the vetting stage. And that's what the next module is all about. I'll see you there. Hey, it's Sam Oh and welcome to the third
module which is all about vetting and validating link prospects. Now, straight-up, this stage is kind of boring. You're basically taking your huge list of
unfiltered prospects and checking them for a couple of things. In short, you want to make sure that
a) they're actually links you want; and b) that your link pitches will be relevant. Now, before we can get into tips on doing
it fast, let's get on the same page of how you do it slowly, step by step. So, when you're vetting prospects using
the methods I taught in the last module, there are 3 steps you can do. I like to look at them in levels depending
on the size of the prospect list. Level 1 is to narrow down your list
of prospects by SEO metrics. Two common metrics people often use are
Domain Rating and domain-level website traffic. Domain Rating basically tells us whether a
site has followed links across their domain. And this is important to some people
because if a website has low authority, then chances are, you won't get much PageRank
by getting a link from a page on their site. Now, DR is far from perfect because
a) it's a third-party metric; and b) PR flows at the page level, so I personally
don't put too much weight on this metric. As for total website traffic, it gives us a hint
whether the site is likely in good standing with Google. For example, it's unlikely that you'll see
a DR 90 site with 0 website traffic unless they've been hit by Google. In my opinion, it makes sense to use
filter when you're working with hundreds or potentially thousands of link prospects. And while you may filter out a handful of
decent prospects, you'll likely remove more low quality prospects than good ones. So the time savings is worth it. Now, trusting these metrics
alone would be a mistake. This leads us nicely into level 2, which
is to ensure that prospects' pages are relevant to the page you'll be pitching. Now, in this stage, you can just scan the titles
of your prospects pages which should give us hints into what the page is about. For example, if we were building links to
our SEO stats page based on the people linking this competing URL, you'll see from
the titles of referring pages that they're all pretty relevant. This one's on SEO interview
questions and answers. This one's on the best digital marketing channels. Then there's this one on ranking on
the first page of Google and so on. But as you continue to go down the list,
you might question whether this one on the "best online shopping sites in
Singapore" is worth reaching out to. The page itself doesn't seem super relevant to
me, but the domain is mediaonemarketing.com. So it sounds like a marketing agency to me which
is relevant to SEO and our page on SEO stats. So I'd personally keep it in our list at this
point, but it wouldn't exactly be a high priority prospect in my opinion. As for a page like this which is on lead gen
competitive advantages for pest control, I'd just exclude it. I'd also exclude pages in other languages
because my content would be in English and so would my outreach pitch. Alright, onto level 3, which is to validate
that your pitch angle is relevant. Now, because our prospecting method
revolves around finding seed prospects based on a linkable point, that means we
need to check each prospect's page to make sure they're still mentioning that point. For example, in our SEO stats campaign,
I exported all backlinks that mention "93" in the anchor and surrounding text. And I did this because the organic
competitor's page doesn't mention the stat, meaning all links pointing to the page
because of the 93% stat are now irrelevant. This also means, we need to validate that the
prospects still mention this stat on the page, because if they're not, then our personalized
email saying, "hey you're mentioning this 93% stat" just wouldn't make sense. So in this case, vetting the page would
actually require us to visit these URLs and do a find on the page for "93." Now, while it only takes around 30 seconds
to verify that a page still mentions the stat, if you have 1,000 pages to inspect, then
that's 500 minutes or over 8 hours of work. Plus, it's a super monotonous task
that's prone to human error. But the good news is that you can do it
more accurately in under 5 minutes by using Screaming Frog's custom search feature. To set it up, click on Configuration, then
hover over Custom, and choose Search. Now, I'll name our custom search to "93%,"
make sure the condition is "Contains" and then type "93" in the search box. Now I'll choose Page Text from
the dropdown and we're all set to go. Now, all I have to do is run the 875
URLs in list mode and run the crawl. From here, you can go to the custom search
tab, choose your filter in the dropdown, and you'll see a list of all URLs
that match your custom search. So in our case, 779 URLs of the 875 that
we crawled, mention our linkable point. Meaning, 96 pages either didn't match the
footprint or returned a non-200 response code. So that saved us around 48 minutes
of precious vetting time. Now, it's not always possible
to vet at scale like this. And that usually depends on
the complexity of your linkable point. For example, we found some lookalike
prospects in Content Explorer by searching for "use lsi keywords" as our query. And our hope was to find pages that recommend
using so-called "LSI keywords" because again, they don't exist. Now, as for our pitch, we might try to gently
educate prospects on so-called "LSI keywords" and offer suggestions to update their content
with more accurate information – where our guide could potentially be an additional resource. Now, just because a page says "use LSI
keywords," it doesn't mean they're all recommending to use them. In fact, this page has the phrase, "use LSI
keywords" on it, but the context of the mention is "Does Google use them?" And in this section, they quote John
Mueller saying that they're not a thing. Unfortunately for complex linkable points like
this, where footprints can have various contexts, the only way to vet these prospects is manually. And I'll talk about hiring good vetters
in our last module on team building. Now, after you've finished your page vetting
process, you'll need to start finding the right people to send your email pitches to. And personally, I consider this
a part of the vetting process because there's research involved to validate
whether the prospect is a good one or not. So in the next lesson, I'll share my experiences
on contacting people with different titles – i.e. author, editor, generic emails etc, and I'll share
some stats on who the best person to contact with your link pitch is. In this lesson, we're going to talk about
who you should contact with your link outreach pitches. Now, generally speaking, you'll want
to contact one of these four people: The author; editor; marketing or content
marketing manager; or a webmaster. And if you can't find contacts for any
of these people, a last resort may be to reach out to a generic email like support@
or contact@ or help@ or whatever. Now, in order to understand who you should
contact, you need to consider these two things: #1. The goal you're trying to achieve; and #2. The size of the company. Let's talk about how goals
impact your contact first. Let's say you're pitching a guest post. Your goal is to have someone within a company
give you the "OK" to publish your content there. Now, you wouldn't contact an author from
the blog or a webmaster because they're not going to be the decision makers
when it comes to having guest writers. You'll probably want to contact the editor. Now, the size of the company can also
play an impact on who you contact. Let's continue running with
the guest posting example. Assuming you wanted to guest post for Ahrefs
Blog, contacting our editor wouldn't be effective. At the time of making this video, we
have a team of seven in-house writers. And our editor's job is to make sure that our posts
flow, are grammatically sound, and look perfect. You would need to contact the head of
content, because he's the person who would give you the yay or nay
on a guest posting opportunity. Alright, let's talk about requesting
edits to an existing post. Contacting the author would be perfectly
reasonable because they're the ones who wrote the content and would know it best. Contacting the editor would also make sense
because they have the power to link and if given a good enough
reason, they might do it. Now, for one of my recent link building campaigns,
where the goal was to get links in existing posts, I kept track of the titles of the people
who we sent pitches to and our link acquisition rates. So 7.56% of authors linked to us, 7.55%
of editors linked to us, surprisingly 4% of generic emails linked to us – mostly small
companies, and just 1.64% of other titles like content marketing manager
or webmaster linked to us. Bottomline, who you contact matters. You need to contact people who can
actually add your link to their page. If they don't have the power to do it, then your
outreach pitch will be more or less pointless. Now, identifying who to contact
is pretty quick and easy. What's arguably the most time-consuming part
of the entire link building process is finding these people's emails. And to make matters worse, you don't even
know whether these campaigns are going to convert to a good number of links. But there's a way you can find emails quickly
and test your campaigns without investing a ton of time into them. It's called the Blitz list and that's what
we're talking about in the next lesson. In this lesson, we're going to talk
about what I call a "blitz list." And a blitz list is simply a fully "ready-to-send"
outreach list which is generated based on a sample of your vetted prospects. And in my opinion, this is the key to testing
outreach campaigns efficiently because the blitz list serves two distinct purposes. #1. It's going to save you a ton of time
from finding emails because it’s all done programmatically. And #2, because only a sample of your big
prospects list will be contacted, it's going to help you validate your outreach pitch. Basically, you'll get an idea of how successful
your campaign will be in under an hour so you can make an educated decision of whether
it's worth continuing with the campaign, pivoting, or cancelling it altogether. Now, before we get to this scaling process,
let's briefly look at how single emails are usually found. So assuming you're contacting the author of
a post, you'd take that author's name and run a search through an email finding tool like Hunter. And if you were taking an extra step to clean
your list of prospects, you'd verify that the email is deliverable using a tool like Neverbounce. Now, when you're finding someone that's not
the author, the process takes significantly longer. You might look through a team page
or the employee directory on LinkedIn to find the most appropriate contact. Then you'd have to run the names and domains
through Hunter and validate again with Neverbounce. Now, assuming there is no team page or
employee directory, you might look at their Facebook About page or a Terms and Conditions
page only to find generic email addresses. And by this point, if we're being honest,
we're kind of getting desperate. The process of finding and validating
email addresses is extremely painful and time-consuming, which is why people look
to networks like Upwork and Mechanical Turk to get people who will find emails for you. And while this might sound smart, I've personally
worked with over 100 different email finders on various networks and my experience
was nothing but awful. Some freelancers will find people's personal
email addresses like a gmail address, but you shouldn't be contacting them there
unless it's stated on their site. Others will provide lists of invalid email
addresses or generic email addresses when there are better options. Plus, human error is real. Now, for those of you with deep pockets, you
might do it in-house where your link builders create content, find prospects, vet them, find
the emails, and then send the outreach pitch. The quality is usually much better, but
it's a super inefficient way to build links. So is good quality email finding
at affordable rates a lost cause? No, because there's the blitz list which
is going to help you find valid email addresses programmatically. Now, at a high level, you run your list of URLs
through Hunter's Author API, where Hunter will search for the author of the page and
show you the email address if it exists. Then you use Never Bounce's API to validate
whether the emails are likely to be deliverable or not. To give you an understanding of the scale
of this method, assuming you had a list of 1,000 prospects, it's very possible to find
60-120 email addresses from your vetted list of prospects and start your outreach
campaign, all within 15-30 minutes. Now, there are 3 ways you
can create your blitz list. The first way is to use Google Sheets. Ideally, you'll want the help of a developer
to create some App Scripts around Hunter's author finder call and Neverbounce's
email verification call. This will give you maximum flexibility
in how you format your sheets. Now, if you want something quick and dirty,
you can start by using Hunter for Sheets, which is a Google Sheets add-on
made by Hunter.io. Once you have it installed, all you
need to do is go to the Finder tab, make sure author finder is selected, choose
the column of your URLs in this box, and when you're ready, hit the "Find Email
Addresses" button. Hunter will then search for author names
and email addresses and print them into the corresponding cells when available. But as you can see, it's not perfect. And this is why you need to use an email
verification API like Neverbounce. Again, a custom app script is ideal in
this situation for the sake of speed, but if you want to go the quick and dirty
route, just go to Neverbounce's Clean tool, upload a CSV of found email addresses,
and then hit the "Clean my list button." Once it's completed, hit the Download
button, select ‘All results' and download your CSV file. Now, the CSV should look like this, so
you can import that into Google Sheets and use the VLOOKUP function to match
statuses with your found email addresses. Alright, the second way is to create
your own custom coded program. This in my opinion is the best route to
go if you plan to scale email finding and have detailed specifications on
how you want your workflow to go. So if you have a link building agency, this
in my opinion, is well worth the investment. Hunter and Neverbounce's APIs are really easy
to work with and for the basic functionality of finding and verifying emails, you should be
able to get a basic job done for under $50. More robust systems will obviously
be much more expensive. And the third option is to use Google
Sheets with a nocode tool like Zapier. This is basically like a blended version
of the first two ways I showed you. You get the simplicity of Google Sheets
with the flexibility of custom coded. The downside is that it can take a
while to set up if you're not familiar with logic programming. Plus, you'll have to use one of Zapier's paid
plans when Appscripts would just be a one-time fee to a developer. I won't expand on how to use Zapier because
I already made a full tutorial on creating this method with the APIs I mentioned so
I'll link that video up in the description. Now, after you've run your URLs through
these APIs, you should have your blitz list of ready-to-send emails based on a small
segment of your vetted list of prospects. But before we can actually send these emails,
you need to choose the outreach approach you'll go with and write up an email template. And that's what the next module is all about. I'll see you there. Hey, it's Sam Oh and welcome to the fourth
module which is all about link outreach. Now, in this module, we'll cover 3 link outreach
approaches, the one that I recommend for the prospecting approach we've already
covered, and how to write these emails for a link building campaign. So let's get this lesson started and talk
about the different link outreach approaches and their pros and cons. Now, there are traditionally
two approaches to outreach. The first is the shotgun approach. This is when you send the exact same email
to all prospects and the only personalization field might be the prospect's name. Now, the main pro of this method is that it's
fast because it basically removes the vetting stage of the link building process. As for cons, you'll naturally spam people,
burn bridges or taint your brand's reputation, risk building links on sites you wouldn't
typically want them on, and you'll likely burn email addresses which can be a real
problem if you're building links at scale. The shotgun approach is a pure numbers game
and it's worked effectively for a lot of people. But personally, it's not for me because
the potential negative impacts on brand far outweigh any "quick wins"
you might get from it. The second approach is sniper outreach. Now, this is literally the opposite
of the shotgun approach. The sniper approach is when you carefully
pick pages and websites you want to get a link from. And rather than using cookie-cutter email
templates, you'll send personalized emails where your first contact may be to start
a conversation rather than to get a link. Now, the pros are that you'll get better
links, potentially start relationships that go beyond the one off link, and your
link acquisition rates will probably be higher. As for the cons: it's not scalable at all;
it can potentially take months to get a link; and it requires above average skills
in negotiation, persuasion, and actually understanding people's desires. So for my personal taste, pure sniper outreach
is too slow to grow in a popular industry where links are a requirement. But, I'll still do it for links that are tough
to get or where the relationship is more important than the link itself. Now, you don't have to use either of these
approaches exclusively – or any of them for that matter. If you think back to the previous modules
in this course, I taught you how to find link prospects in a very specific way – which was
essentially to find and segment prospects by linkable points. And if you followed along with this
method, then you'll see that neither of these outreach approaches are optimal. For example, if you were to use the shotgun
approach for these prospects, it wouldn't make much sense because then all the
upfront research and segmentation work would be for nothing. Similarly, the sniper approach doesn't really
make sense either because each segment of prospects has a lot in common. So you don't really need to do 100% bespoke
outreach for each and every prospect. And this brings us nicely onto the link
outreach approach I recommend in most situations, which is the hybrid approach. Much like the shotgun approach, you send
emails to a large group of prospects. And similar to the sniper approach,
the emails are personalized to a degree. And the personalization is usually based on
a commonality among a segment – otherwise known as a linkable point. Hence, it's kind of a hybrid
approach to link outreach. The pros of this method is that you're able
to send personalized emails at scale and link acquisition rates from my experience
are typically in the 5 to 12% range. As for the cons, it can be quite difficult
to consistently find seed prospects that that are actually good. Meaning, you need to be able to analyze
data and creatively come up with angles which sometimes won't work. Now, regardless of the approach you use,
the anatomy of the emails should more or less be the same. It's about finding a good reason for contact
and providing a value proposition that will resonate with a cold audience - and this
is by far the hardest part of outreach. So in the next lesson, we're going to dive deep
into finding good reasons for contact and what quote unquote, "value" looks like when
sending outreach emails with the hybrid outreach approach. In this lesson, we're going to talk about
scaling so-called "value" using the hybrid outreach approach. Now, in the previous lesson, I mentioned that
outreach emails usually have a similar anatomy. They include a good reason for
contact and a value proposition. And the great thing about using the hybrid
approach is that your linkable point will be your "good reason for contact." For example, if they have an outdated stat,
your reason for contact is to tell them about it and share new data. Or if they've mentioned a specific tactic like
the 50/30/20 budget rule, then you can use that to set the context of the conversation. Now, finding a value proposition that appeals
to the majority is the tough part because "value" is subjective to the person
receiving the email. But because the hybrid approach forces
you to segment prospects, your value propositions can be more impactful because
of the similar attributes that prospects have in a given segment. Now, there is no set list of value propositions
because it depends highly on the context of your linkable point. But a good way to start brainstorming value
props is to think about how your reason for contact impacts prospects
and their audiences. For example, a while back, I was working on
a natural health site and noticed that an article from a large publication was recommending to
consume cinnamon to lose weight because of a chemical compound called cinnamaldehyde. Now, a top leading essential oils expert
specifically states in his book that you should not consume too much
cinnamaldehyde because it can kill you. So how many people are saying this? Well, with a search like this in Content Explorer,
you'll see that there are hundreds of pages. So we have our reason for contact that's
going to set the context of our email. Now, how does this impact
prospects and their audience? And does it impact them enough to make an
edit to their post and potentially link to us? Well, if someone follows their tips,
there could potentially be lost lives and lawsuits. So in my eyes, there was potential
for a pretty strong pitch. So I actually updated my page on cinnamon
essential oil stating these facts and contacted prospects letting them know of
potential dangers in their content. I also shared a link to the $100+ book and a page
number as a reference to strengthen my pitch. And of course, I offered the tl;dr which
was written in my post which they could access for free. As for the results, I was able to secure
some top notch links from big publications with an almost 20% conversion rate. Now, it's important to note that my email
was not about inducing fear into prospects. It was written to highlight the importance
of updating their content. So my link outreach was actually
fun to do and it was well received. Now, pitch angles don't always
have to be about life or death. And they won't always be this strong. But sometimes, that isn't even
necessary to get good results. I'll give you an example from
our SEO stats campaign. As a quick refresher, we noticed that a competing
page had a ton of backlinks because of the stat, "93% of online experiences begin
with a search engine." And that stat was super outdated
and not even on the target page, making all links based on that stat irrelevant. Now, the reason for contact is that the 93%
stat they've mentioned isn't on the page. But to be frank, this reason is no better
than saying "you have a broken link." So how does this impact
prospects and their audience? Well, the truth is that most people won't
care because everyone has outdated content on their site, and it's impossible to keep
everything up to date at all times. So the angle we went with was to tell
them that the page they're linking to doesn't even mention the stat and
we accentuated how outdated it is. We said something along the lines of
"That stat is actually fourteen years old. More recent research suggests that this number
has gone down to 68% because of X, Y and Z." In other words, our value prop was fresh
data to keep your content up to date. As a result, we had a conversion rate of 6.8%
on this campaign with no follow-up emails. Not bad but not great. So how could we have made
this appeal to more people? Well, seeing as there was a huge change
in the data point, 93% to 68%, one thing we could have done was to offer to rewrite
a paragraph or part of their article to make it reflect current data better –
whether they linked to us or not. This isn't the strongest pitch, but in my
opinion, it's better than what we had before. So bottomline, when you're coming up with
value propositions, try and brainstorm ideas by segment. Use your reason for contact as a starting
point to understand how linking to you will impact prospects and benefit their audience. It's not an easy exercise, but you'll find
that strong value propositions that are tied to your linkable point will a) create
a very easy to write outreach email; and b) can lead to incredible conversion
rates for link acquisition. Now, when people use templates, the
result is usually a robotic sounding email. And that's likely the reason why the
majority of outreach emails in your inbox seem like spam. So in the next lesson, I'm going to give you
some tips and exercises to write templated outreach emails that don't sound generic. In this lesson, we're going to talk about
writing templated outreach emails that are personalized and don't
feel or sound too templated. Now, why does this matter? Well, link building is often looked at as
a spammy tactic from both SEO outsiders and insiders – and for good reason. People are sending emails like this that
sound like they were swiped from templates on blog posts. They're disingenuous and clearly transactional. Now, if you're sending these generic templated
emails, your chances of standing out are slim and link building is truly only a numbers game. In other words, emails like this are more likely
to get marked as spam than to lead to a link. Now, there's no video, book, blog post,
or course that's going to make you a master writer of outreach emails. Practice and feedback are what
will help you get better at this skill. And for that reason, I'm going to walk you
through some examples and an exercise to help you get your reps in. But before we get to this exercise, let's
look at a typical templated email and talk about why it sounds templated. So, in my opinion, a huge reason for these
robotic sounding emails is that people focus on creating templates
rather than writing emails. And when you work off of a template, you're
basically searching for predefined personalization fields to satisfy the template. When in reality, it should
be the other way around. For example, a template might look like this. "Hi [name], I was reading your post on
and really liked how you mentioned ." No matter what you put into these
blanks, it's going to sound unnatural. Now, a much better way to do this is to write
a personalized email to one of your prospects and then extract personalization fields,
if any, to see if it can be templated. Here's what an email might look like: "Hey Frank, Wondering if you've tried broken link building
since you wrote this post (in 2019 it seems). I know that the Forbes writer you mentioned
said they converted links at 20%, but boy oh boy… it's tough to believe you can still
convert links like that today with BLB." So if we extract the personalization fields from
this sample, then we'd need to find the URL of the contact's page, the publishing date,
the competing page's company name, and the 20% part. Now, the beautiful thing about the hybrid
method is that all of these personalization fields aside from the year of publishing can
be easily templated because we're sending emails to segments. For example, our segment for the example
we just went through would be people who link to Forbes' hypothetical page on
broken link building because of their 20% success rate. Now, if we were to templatize this
email, it'd look something like this: "Hey [name], Wondering if you've tried broken link building
since you wrote this post (in year it seems))." And we'd link to the prospect's URL
with some HTML and a merge field. And everything after that would be
the same because we're only sending this email to our 20% segment. Now, if you struggle to write natural
outreach emails, you can do this simple exercise of writing an email and
extracting merge fields from it. Let's dig deeper into this exercise
and write an email together. But first, we need a scenario to work with. Let's say that you have a personal finance blog
and you wrote an awesome post on budgeting. Now, as you're researching a competing
page's link profile, you notice that a good chunk of their links are attributable to a point
around the 50/30/20 budgeting method. Now, for illustration purposes, we'll say
that you have a way better budgeting method that you created. So a rough pitch angle can be something
like, "the 50/30/20 budgeting rule sucks. I made this awesome new method that
you're going to love because of X Y and Z." Great, we have a segment to work with
and it's time to start drafting our email. The first thing to do in this exercise is to
choose one prospect from your segment and write an email to them
as if they're a friend. Let's choose this one. Now, the page is clearly recommending to
use the 50/30/20 budget rule and again, our hypothetical post has a better method
– let's call it "the 40/10/10/40 rule." So as a first draft, I might write: "Yo! Quick question: I'm seeing that you
recommend the 50/30/20 budget rule on your blog. Are you personally using this? Because I think it's a super impractical way
for millennials to save with mortgage payments, kids, college funds etc. Basically, the money printers are going brrr. If interested, I wrote about why the 50/30/20
budget rule is impractical and an alternative method on my blog which is better for
millennials (the 40/10/10/40 rule). There's a spreadsheet in there
too if you want to give it a shot. Let me know what you think and a link to my
post would be super appreciated if you agree with my method. And if you don't… fight me. Kidding. Miss you. Sam" This is obviously far from what you might
send to someone, but the point of this step is to a) break away from templates so
you sound a little bit more like yourself; and b) to go in with the mentality of delivering
value because that's what friends do for each other. Alright, so that email took me
around 4 minutes to write. So I'm going to move on to step 2 which
is to go through our first round of edits. And at this stage, you'll want to remove any
empty statements, false flattery, and language you typically wouldn't use with a stranger. So I'll change "Yo" to "Hey Frank" and
remove the "Quick question" part because it's kind of pointless to have. Now, this part where I say that it's "a super
impractical way to budget" comes off a bit strong and arrogant, so I'll change it to… "Are you using this method because I've
personally found it to be an impractical way for millennials to save with mortgage
payments, kids' college funds etc." And in my opinion, this "personal angle"
changes the context from "people who use this method are dumb"
to "it didn't work for me." Now, the "money printers going brrr" part
is a finance meme related to the federal government printing money
which has led to asset inflation. It doesn't really sit well with
me, so I'll change this line to: "With rising inflation and wages having
barely budged, allocating 30% to wants and 20% to savings seems
like a recipe for disaster." The next part seems fine at first read. But the "lmk" part that comes
after is a bit too informal. Plus "let me know what you
think" is an empty statement. So I'll rework this sentence to… "If you agree with my method, a mention
in your post would be super appreciated. Alright, so this looks okay for me so I'll
move on to the next step which is to ask someone for feedback. And to give you a real simulation
of what this might look like, I asked my friend and outreach
extraordinaire, Bibi Raven, for input. Let's take a look through her feedback. So in the first part, "I'm seeing that you
recommend", she says that it's good to get straight to the point but prefers to use
some sort of "nicety" comment before the intro to make it sound more genuine
and not like a zillion other emails. And the example she uses is wishing
people an excellent cup of coffee. Now, she's not talking about
fake flattery or anything like that. If you've ever talked with Bibi, when she says
these things like hope you have an excellent cup of coffee, I think she actually means it. But it's just not me, so I'm not going
to take her suggestion here. And I think an important takeaway from
this is that you shouldn't try to sound or be like someone else because it will surface
in your email copy and play against you. Alright, so next, she left a comment on this
part: "your blog," and she suggests using the brand's name because a lot of link
builders use this phrase in their outreach. Now, while I agree on the whole, there are two
reasons why I'm hesitant to take the suggestion. #1. I don't think it'll be worth the additional
effort to manually format each person's brand name. And #2. Emails sometimes look more
templated to me when people use a personalization field here. For example, if I had a blog at samoh.com
and someone said… "I'm seeing that you recommend the 50/30/20 rule on
the Sam Oh blog," it just sounds weird. So rather than potentially overcomplicating
this part, I'm going to pass on this suggestion. Now, the next part, I say: "are you using
this method because I've personally found it to be an impractical way." And Bibi brings up a couple of great points. First, she says that I've made this email
about me and the site owner/editor when it should be centered more
on their audience. Agree! Second, she says that this isn't really a
question, but it's actually implicit criticism. And the example she uses
makes it crystal clear. "Are you still using hairspray
because I think it's bad for you." It just sounds awful, so I think
this needs to be rewritten. Now, the next comment is a small
one and I fully agree with her. On the "etcetera" part, she says it just
adds vagueness to the statement. There's no denying that. Moving on. The part where I say "if interested," she
suggests a small edit so that I'm speaking directly to the reader – "If you're interested." But, she offers an alternative
which I like better. She says to not make it an "if"
thing but to write more confidently. So this sentence needs to be reworked too. Alright, on to the more critical stuff. For the pitch part, she tells me that
it doesn't sound enthusiastic. Why not mention why it's better, why it fits
their audience, results people have gotten, and more juicy stuff. Basically, she's pointed out how weak my
pitch is and she is absolutely bang on. So there's another rewrite
that I fully agree with. Now, on the spreadsheet part, she says
it's good not to push too hard because from her point of view, it just
sounds "whatever whatever." And if I take myself out of this bubble
where all people love spreadsheets, it becomes clear that it truly
is "whatever whatever." And within her comment, a suggestion
that really resonated with me was to tell them how my budgeting method
has brought value to others. So I'll definitely take that
suggestion in my rewrite. As for the last part of the email, she tells
me that this sentence sounds similar to what other link builders use so basically,
another rewrite that I agree with. And for the sign off, she says to use
a more creative, warmer sign off. I'm actually fine with cheers, but her "may
the budget be with you" made me smile so I'll use something along those lines. Last but certainly not least, she made a
comment on the overall flow of the email. She said: "Maybe it's weird, but I also like
to look at how you start each section in your email. In this case, it's "I'm, if, if." Now, when I saw that, I realized how focused the
email is on myself and my passive statements. Alright, so after soaking in all of her feedback, I
took another 15-20 minutes to rewrite the email and here's what I came up with. "Hey Frank, I see that you're recommending
the 50/30/20 budget rule on your blog. It's definitely a great method if you own
assets, but it has some drawbacks – especially for millennials and households
that make under 80k/year in the US. With rising inflation (money printer go brrrr)
and wages moving at a much slower pace, most households need to allocate more than
50% to needs and have very little left for wants, let alone savings. Another budgeting method that your audience
might appreciate is the 40/10/10/40 rule. It's when you [Whatever it does because
it's not actually a real thing]. It's worked for people like: Jane, a single mom from Ohio, who's now able
to contribute to her children's college savings; Derek, a recent grad, who was able to
pay off his student loans in 2 years with the help of our spreadsheet; Jamie, an executive at a tech company
that's now saving 23% more each year, which she donates to charities. I wrote about this budgeting method
on my blog and would love to get your thoughts and opinions. Also, if you dig it, a mention in your
post would send me to the moon. Happy budgeting, Sam" It's a bit long, but I'm relatively happy with
this email, so let's move on to the next step which is to see if it can be templated
without sacrificing the personalized feel. So assuming we were sending this to anyone
who's recommending the 50/30/20 budget rule, I think the only thing that would need
to change is the name of the recipient. And the size of our segment in this
case, would be up to 465 prospects. Now, all you have to do is rinse and repeat
the same steps for your other segments and you should be able to do hybrid
outreach in an effective and impactful way. Now, everything I've shared in this course from
prospecting to vetting to outreach can be done by yourself. But if you really want to scale up your link
building operations, then you'll need a team, a system, and workflows to follow. And that's what the next module is all about. In module 5, we'll be looking at link building
from a managerial and operational perspective so you can help your team reach maximum
efficiency in your link building efforts. I'll see you there. Hey, it's Sam Oh and welcome to the fifth
module which is all about building a link building team and creating
efficient systems and workflows. Let's kick things off with the first lesson in
this module where we'll talk about structuring and hiring different members
for your link building team. Now, there are two team
models that I've seen work. The first model is to have a team of
all-in-one marketers who do everything from writing the content to finding prospects,
finding emails, and doing all the outreach. And the second model is when each team
member focuses on just one part of the link building process. For example, you might have
a prospector who only does prospecting. A vetter who only does vetting. And an outreach manager
who only does the outreach. Now, the first model can be effective because
the content creator will know their content best, and they'll also have a good understanding
of who their link prospects are. But I've never seen a team do this efficiently. Reason being, no one is a master of all
the stages in the link building process and no one wants to do all of these things. For example, content creators might love
the content creation and prospecting aspects. But I highly doubt that many will enjoy
finding emails, vetting prospects, and/or doing email outreach. This leads to inefficiencies and sloppiness
in areas where these all-in-one marketers aren't as strong. As for the second model, it's much more
efficient because each person handles a part of the link building process. They become masters of their role and over
time, synergy is created within the team, leading to a system that works
like an efficient assembly line. Everyone's doing their part. I'll expand on why I think this is the best
way to go in the next lesson when we talk about systems, but first, let's talk about
the different people you'll need to hire, the skills, traits and qualifications you
should look for, as well as an overview of their roles and responsibilities. So the first person is a prospector. Now, a lot of people look at this job as lower-level. And I think it's because prospectors are
often given an SOP to find prospects for common link building tactics like broken
link building or the Skyscraper technique. These are easy to put into a step-by-step
process because it rarely requires creativity. But when you're going with the seed and
lookalike approach that I taught in module 2, it's a little bit more of a bespoke experience
where you need to be able to analyze data and creatively execute on it. And that's why I think prospecting is arguably
the most important part of the link building process for the seed and lookalike approach. Your campaign's success is dependent on
the relevance and quality of your prospects. Meaning, if you get your prospects wrong,
then your outreach will be ineffective and vetting would have just been a waste of time. Now, as for skills and qualifications, this
person should have strong knowledge in SEO, have solid researching skills, be
an analytical thinker, and be creative. And their roles and responsibilities
will primarily be behind the scenes. They'll work with the outreach manager
to come up with pitch angles; work with content, design, and dev
teams to ensure all assets are ready; and they'll set up the campaigns in a data
management tool like Google Sheets or whatever you use in your organization. Now, their role also overlaps
a lot with a project manager. And for that reason, I think they're usually
the best person to manage projects until or if you need a dedicated PM. Alright, next up is the vetter. Now, this person's job is to qualify and
disqualify prospects based on a set list of criteria. And this criteria will vary depending on
your organization's SOPs and requirements. As for skills and qualifications, the two
things I look for are attention to detail and their ability to follow instructions consistently. Now, their roles and responsibilities will
actually be the most time consuming. The majority of their time will be spent
reviewing prospects and their pages to ensure they meet your list of quality standards. They'll also update prospect statuses in your
spreadsheet and potentially find email addresses. Now, the reason why I say to potentially
find email addresses is because some people prefer to hire a dedicated email finder. But from my experience, my vetters have always
done a better job at finding email addresses. Plus, the blitz list eases
quite a bit of this pain too. Alright, the final person on your
team will be your outreach manager. This is the person responsible for sending
all emails and managing the relationships that come from them. And because good outreach is all
about relationship management, the skills I look for include: strong communication skills; good with
people; organized; strong copywriters; and creativity. As for roles and responsibilities, they'll
be writing emails, templatizing them, and building and maintaining
relationships with key people. Now, contrary to what many believe,
outside of the prospector, I don't think vetters or outreach managers need
any link building or SEO experience. The best vetter that I've worked with had
a background in SaaS quality assurance. And one of the best outreach managers
I've worked with had a strong background in sales. And the outreach manager I'm currently
working with, has a strong background in relationship building and copywriting. So in my opinion, when hiring and building
your team, it's important to focus on the core competencies of the role rather
than looking for "SEO specialists." Things like metrics are easy to teach,
while creativity and people skills are not. Now, whether your team has a strong
background or no background in SEO, you're going to need a system
for them to work in. And the system is going to help you stay
organized because there are a lot of moving pieces in a link building campaign, and
it'll also smoothen out your processes to maximize your efficiency. So in the next lesson, we'll talk about the five
key components to create a link building system. In this lesson, we're going to go over
how to create a link building system to maximize your team's
effectiveness and efficiency. Now, systems are key to scaling. They help your team stay organized
and smoothen out processes. But many people think that a system is
just a list of steps where you hire people to fill those roles. For example, an assembly line
might have spots for 3 people. A packer, an inspector, and a sealer. The first person is responsible
for packing the box. Then it moves down the conveyor belt to
the second person, who's responsible for inspecting the contents. Then it moves down again to
the final person who seals the box. Everything runs like a well-oiled machine
and each person is doing their part. Now, while this all seems well and good, complex
systems will almost never work this smoothly. And there are two reasons for that. #1. Systems need to be customized for
the organization and the people in it. For example, an organization may choose
only to contact editors with bespoke emails to protect potential damage done to
their brand via. templated emails. Or a company that outsources link building,
may not want to give you an @ domain email, which can potentially change
the angle you go in with. And #2. The efficiency of a system is fragile. For example, if the first person in our assembly
line were to quit, then the other two people have nothing to do. But that's an easy fix. Just hire and train someone else. The real fragility in a system that's
built for scale is alignment. For example, let's say the first person packs
the box and then the package moves down to the second person. They check the contents and they're like... "Hey, you can't just throw the item
in the box like this. You need to place the item
so it's facing this way." And then the first person might
be like... "who cares?" They might continue to argue
with no real conclusion. All the while, the third person is just
waiting to seal the box and the queue of items are just building up. In other words, while the system is
designed to move in the same direction, the people aren't aligned, which
makes their impact null. Now, because of these reasons, I'm going
to share the 5 key components to create a link building system that will
be right for your organization. Alright, so the first component
is the structure of the team. Ideally, you want to have different team
members handle different parts of the link building process. This helps to create your assembly line
from a structural standpoint and it also helps individuals to develop
mastery in their role. And as people get better at their jobs,
things move faster and more effectively. The second is alignment
in your company's goals. It might sound cheesy to some, but I think
it's important to set specific goals for your link building team. For example, you may have a goal to get
50 new referring domains each month to revenue-generating pages. And the purpose of these links is
to rank higher in Google and get more traffic as a result. Now, when each member knows and
understands this goal, it makes their work more meaningful because they know
what they're working towards and what it'll take to get there. A common incentive I've seen companies
do is to give their link building team monthly, quarterly, or annual performance bonuses. This can help to further incentivize the team
as a unit because each person depends on the other to reach the company's goals. The third component is to create
standard operating procedures or SOPs. These are detailed documents and
videos that explain how to carry out a task from start to finish. They help to ensure that each person is
moving in the same direction towards the same goal. And they're also great resources to
have when onboarding new hires. Now, the best way to create SOPs is to
actually go through the process yourself, or have a team lead do it. And while you're doing the prospecting,
vetting, and outreach, you should document the process as if you're teaching
someone who's never done it before. And when you hand these off to new employees,
it should ease quite a bit of the hand holding that you'd have to do otherwise. At Ahrefs, we create SOPs for pretty
much every marketing channel. We have them for our blog, for our
YouTube channel, and of course, for link building. Alright, the fourth component is
to use a project management tool. Project management tools like Trello,
Notion, Airtable, and Asana are a great way to organize all your
campaigns in one spot. And they're particularly useful if you have
multiple campaigns running simultaneously. Let's look at an example using
Kanban boards in Notion. As you can see, I've created 5 columns and
named them Brainstorming, Prospecting, Vetting, Outreach, and Completed. These represent the various stages
that a campaign may go through. I've also created some cards,
which represent campaigns. Now, within each of these cards, you can
assign it to a team member, change statuses, add custom fields and files, leave comments
and tag other members in your organization, and add whatever you'd like
in the description area. This will help you stay organized by keeping
your assets in one place and also all relevant communications should take place there too. Now, to show you how this works, let's say
that the brainstorming stage went well and it was time for prospecting. The person in charge of this step would
then choose "prospecting" as the status, assign it to the prospector, and then
leave a comment to let them know. Now, if we go back to the kanban board,
you'll see that it's moved down the pipeline. And as you continue to progress through
your campaign, it'll continue to move down the assembly line. Now, imagine you had 10 different campaigns
running at once with a team of 5. At any given point, everyone on your
team will be able to get a high level view of where each link building campaign
is and what they're responsible for. Alright the fifth component of a link
building system is to use a campaign management tool that supports
simultaneous collaboration. Now, when I say campaign management,
I'm referring to the actual campaign data you'll be working with. And the best tool for this is Google Sheets. You can customize your sheet however you'd
like and multiple team members can work together simultaneously so no time is wasted. For example, if you had two vetters working
on a campaign, one can start from the top of the list and another from the bottom
to double the speed of vetting. You can also write your own functions
in App Scripts, allowing you to connect to third party APIs. And this is how you'd run a blitz
list right inside Sheets. On top of that, Google Sheets has a ton
of built in functions like QUERY, FILTER, and VLOOKUP to name a few. These will help filter large datasets
and match data from other sources. Now, no system is perfect and it's
going to require some tweaking. So as you go through the process, be
conscious of inefficiencies and blockers and find ways to eliminate them with the
people who are involved in these processes. And I can't stress how important it is
to solve these quickly because a lot of time can be wasted by just dealing with
inconveniences that can potentially be solved easily. Now, the system is just the structure of
your everyday link building operations. Workflows on the other hand
are what fuel the system. And that's what your team will be using
day in and day out to execute these link building campaigns. So in the next lesson, I'll show you what a
hypothetical link building team's workflows might look like in action. In this lesson, we're going to put
everything we've learned into action and I'll show you what a link building campaign
might look like from a workflow standpoint. So naturally, we'll revisit some concepts
and techniques that I taught in previous modules and I'll also give you an over
the shoulder view of how the system works in reality. Now, a lot of link building teams I've
seen typically work with a linear model. The prospector does the prospecting,
then the vetter does the vetting, and then the outreach manager sends
the emails once everything is ready. Now, I've used this method for
many years and it does work. But what I've found to work more efficiently
is a triangular model, especially when you're using the techniques I've taught
throughout this course. So here's what it looks like at a high level. The prospector starts by looking for
prospects based on a linkable point. They'll segment these prospects and pass
over their research to the outreach manager who will begin drafting email
templates for each segment. These are all things we've discussed
throughout the course. The prospector will create a master
Google sheet and clean up the list, then generate the blitz list and then they'll
pass over the campaign sheet to the vetter. Now, the prospector is out of this
campaign so they'll actually pick up another campaign to work on while
the rest of the team does their part. Let's continue on with the vetter's role. The vetter will review blitz list prospects in
batches starting with valid emails found in the blitz list because it's the fastest
way to kick off a campaign and validate whether your outreach angle will work. Again, all of these concepts were
covered in previous lessons. After they're done vetting this batch,
they'll contact the outreach manager and they'll send off the first batch of emails. Now, while the vetting and outreach
were happening, the prospector likely finished their work on the second campaign. They would have assigned more email templates
to the outreach manager and the vetter would also start working on this campaign too. And the cycle will continue where the prospector
picks up the next campaign or brainstorms more opportunities and the system will continue
to operate like a well-oiled machine. Now, by this point, none of these
campaigns have been completed. They're all just being validated
with blitz lists. But once a campaign has been validated
from a blitz list, the vetter will start manually reviewing the remainder of
the URLs in that campaign. And each day before they log off, they'll ping
the outreach manager to let them know that a batch of prospects are ready for them. Now, if you're used to the linear
model, then this might have been slightly difficult to envision. So let me give you an over the shoulder
view of what this looks like in action. Alright, so let's assume that our link
building team consists of one prospector, one vetter, and one outreach manager. We'll call them Sam, George, and Josh. Sam, the prospector starts off by having
a meeting with the content lead. They come up with a few
different pages that need links. One on content marketing stats, another
on blogging statistics, and one for their link building post. Now, in this meeting, they establish rough
pitch angles for each post and any assets that'll be needed for the content
to make the pitches work. So a card is created for each campaign in
their project management tool, target URLs are added, and some rough notes for general
guidance are added in the description. Alright, so we're done brainstorming a small
batch of campaigns, so as the prospector, I'll drag one of them into the prospecting stage
and start putting my research into a sheet. Now, as you can see, the note that I made is
"same as we did for the SEO stats campaign." In short, we checked link profiles of competing
pages, analyzed anchors to create our segments, and then exported our prospects by segment. I won't go deeper into this because we have
a 3-part case study on how we did it for SEO stats post, plus, I've taught the methodology
in our prospecting module. Alright, so let's fast forward around 30
minutes, we end up with a spreadsheet like this, where we've noted the linkable
points which are the segments, the size of each segment, and some more
detailed information for reference. And because our SOP says to add our
sheet as a file to our card, I'll do that. Now I'll rename it to something
like "Segments/Initial research." All good! Time to loop in our outreach manager so
they can start drafting email templates for each segment. Done. Alright, it's time to actually create
our campaign spreadsheet now. So for this campaign, we'd need to export
all segments from Ahrefs Site Explorer. And all I would have to do is go to the
backlink profile of a competing page, search for our segment's footprint within
the anchor and surrounding text, and then export the report. All of this research was
done in the previous stage. Now, for this particular campaign, I downloaded
14 reports in Ahrefs Site Explorer, one report per segment, and created a merged version
of our master sheet with each URL labeled with their segment. And in total, we have
5,538 rows in this sheet. So I'll add our "sheet link" in the custom
field in the Notion Card because the SOP says to do it, and we're ready to move on. The next thing I'd do is filter the results. And I'd start by removing obvious
spam and irrelevant pages. So that might be URLs from blogspot
or URLs on .ru and .pw domains. I'd also remove URLs that contain certain
footprints like /job/, /forum/ and a bunch of others that should be
outlined in the SOP. Finally, I'd deduplicate URLs by
root domain, since we won't want to contact people from the same website
multiple times on the same campaign. And Google Sheets has a feature to do this. Just select your sheet, click on "Data",
hover over "Data cleanup", and hit "Remove duplicates." Our data has headers so I'll check that, and
then I'll choose just the root domain column. Finally, hit "Remove duplicates,"
and we're done. But as you can see, we've already done
this and our sheet shrunk from over 5,500 URLs to just over 3,300. Now, this list is still quite large and there's
probably a lot of URLs in here that we wouldn't want to get links from. So this is when I'd start filtering by metrics. As a hypothetical example, I'm going to
filter for pages that have less than 200 visits to their domain from organic search. Then I'll delete all of these rows. And if we remove the filter, you'll see
that we're left with 1,360 prospects. From a quick scan, most of these pages
look fine from a relevance standpoint. So the last thing I'm going to do is run our blitz
list to find as many valid emails as we can fast. And I've already covered how to do this
in lesson 3.3, so feel free to watch that for more information. Anyway, here's what our sheet looks like now. As the prospector, I'm officially done with
this campaign, so I'll hand it off to the vetter by assigning him in the project management
system and letting him know where I left off. Then I'll go and pick up my next
project and rinse and repeat. Alright, let's move on to the vetter. Now, because we've already found some
valid email addresses in our blitz list, that's where the vetter is going to start. So we'll filter for just "valid" email addresses
and we were able to attain this information by using Neverbounce's API. Now, George is going to visit each of these
pages and go through our vetting checklist. And for each URL that matches all criteria,
he'll mark the status down as "Ready." And for pages that don't match the criteria,
he'll mark them as "Disqualified." Now, after he's finished going through
the valid blitz list prospects, he's going to tag the outreach manager to let them
know that the blitz list has been vetted. And we'll get to the outreach manager a bit. Now, as for the vetter, they'll likely work on
the next campaign that the prospector has sent because the point of the blitz list
is to quickly validate how successful your campaign might be without putting
in all the manual work of finding contacts and vetting URLs. But for illustration purposes, let's say
we got a 9.5% conversion rate from blitz list prospects. Assuming that was good in our books,
then the campaign is validated. So the vetter would simply go through
all the other URLs that don't have a valid status and find email addresses
for the ones that are qualified. Alright, let's move on to
the outreach manager. Now, we need to rewind a bit here because
the outreach manager's work is dependent on the prospector's and vetter's deliverables. So again, before the prospector merged and
cleaned the prospects list, the outreach manager was given a sheet like this
where the linkable points, or segments, were outlined along with additional details. So while the prospector and vetter are doing
their work, the outreach manager will be busy writing email drafts for each segment and
templating them, just as I had shown you in lesson 4.3. in the outreach module. Once they've done this, they'd need to set
up the campaign in their outreach tool. And this will vary based
on the tool you use. Now, once the vetter pings the outreach manager
to let them know that the blitz list has been vetted, the outreach manager would go to the sheet,
and export contacts in the "Ready" status. And in this case, we've built a custom
formula to automatically populate this list. Now, to avoid accidentally sending the same
person a duplicate email, they're going to update the sheet and change any status
that's in the "Ready" state to the "Sent" state. Then they'd upload the export file to
their outreach tool, and go through the outreach process. Now, these workflows are guided by the SOPs
and the system makes it possible to work collaboratively in an organized fashion. But something to note is that people
work at different paces and with different levels of experience. So you're going to have to monitor and optimize
your systems and workflows accordingly. Now, from an efficiency standpoint,
with a team of 3, you can potentially send hundreds or maybe even thousands of
personalized emails in a week depending on how strict you are with vetting and
the number of prospects you have. Now, while scaling can be exciting, you
shouldn't be using these systems and workflows to spam people because you'll
just be doing an overly complicated link building strategy without results
to show for your effort. Nothing I've taught in this course is a magic
formula and it does take some creativity to execute successfully. Take the extra time to vet your prospects,
go the extra mile with personalization even if your output suffers a bit, and I'm confident
that you'll find the link building process more effective, efficient, and enjoyable. And that's a wrap. Thanks so much for joining me
in this link building course. And if you want to get updated with more
actionable SEO and marketing tutorials, then consider subscribing
to our YouTube channel. Or if you want to check out more marketing
courses, then check out ahrefs.com/academy where all of our courses are free. And if you have any questions, leave
them in the comments and we'll do our absolute best to get back to you. I'll see you in the next tutorial.
