Having trouble with your outreach in 2025?
Creating an email for link building is nothing new and has been around for a while. However, it can be a relentless task and take up a lot of time, and sometimes, there will be very little to show for it. But sometimes, it can pay off handsomely if done right, and I have seen some success in it in the past couple of months.
Outreach Checklist
I have a checklist of things I go through to make sure my letter has the highest possible success rate of being acknowledged by the intendant recipient, getting a response back should be your number one target, worry about the other stuff later (price, placement of link, length of deal), our first concern is getting an email back.
Tips and Tricks
So here are some tips to follow to make sure we hit above the average of 1/10 emails back or provide ourselves the best opportunity to do so—at the end of the day, we have no influence over whether they actually want to respond to us or not, but we want to give them every reason to want to respond.
-
- Send emails from your most frequently used email address (ideally your official company email). This is for two reasons—first, it looks far more professional sending an email with an official signature in it rather than using your Yahoo/Gmail account. Second, we will see the potential reply come back, and this will allow us to move the conversation along in a timely process (no need to worry about the three-day rule here).
- Use their name in your contact letter if they are on the site. Avoid typing ‘dear sir/madam’, I see this on 9/10 of the spam emails sent from the other side of the world offering up “great page rank directories for a really low offer of £2.99”– no thanks… if you have to lead in with good morning/afternoon, again think when they might receive this email and tailor it to them. Which leads me nicely in to my next point.
- Think about when you are sending the email, don’t send it 1st thing in the morning to a blogger who lives in the states, by the time they open their emails up yours could be lost in the morning email pile up of. Send one when you think there emails might be at their quietest .
- Keep them interested. Your opening email needs to be long enough to cover your key points but short enough for them not to think it’s a chore to read the whole thing. This is especially important if they know it is a link request from the beginning. You want to keep them involved.
- Be transparent, acknowledge something about their site, maybe they have a guest post section which makes life easier for you and provides you a lead in or indicate to them that you came across a blog post on their site that you feel you could provide some further insight to as it is your line of expertise.
If you can’t find an email address, that doesn’t mean you have to give up straight away. Reach out to them on X (Twitter). This technique seems to have a higher success rate than email for initial contact. Dialogue can take longer to transfer to email, however.
Note, many of these tips help form the email and ultimately you need to offer the recipient something in return for a link whether that is providing them with information about their site i.e a broken link, 404 page or offering up some content or a prize for a giveaway, but more on that next time…