- Okay, so in this video you're going to discover
how to write the perfect email for your
link building outreach campaign.
Now if you want to learn how to write an email
that generates over 200 backlinks,
which I actually did with one email campaign,
then this video is definitely for you.
You'll also discover some of the rookie mistakes
most people make, why most average emails
actually go into the spam inbox,
and how to really optimize your copy
to make sure you get as many links
and as many high quality backlinks as possible
from your link building outreach.
So let's be honest, 99% of average emails actually suck.
Most of them go to the spam inbox,
most of them get ignored by webmasters,
and when you're doing link building outreach
you're actually competing with potentially
10 or 20 other people
who've landed in the inbox that single day.
So it is really difficult,
if you don't have the right knowledge
to optimize your email campaign.
And that's what we're gonna cover in this video, okay?
Now by the way, if you want more traffic,
if you want to build more links,
if you wan to learn the secrets of link building outreach
then don't forget to subscribe to this channel,
because I will be releasing new guides
and videos every single week.
By the way, just a little bit about me,
I'm Julian Goldie.
I'm a full time white hat link builder.
This is my web profile actually
you can see in front of you here,
and yeah, I've worked on dozens of link building campaigns.
I mostly focus on the Skyscraper Technique,
and link building average is what I do full-time.
So yeah.
Now let's get into the video.
Okay, so there's a ton of mistakes people make
when they're doing link building average.
And email was one of the things that most people get wrong.
So I'm gonna run through a couple of really bad examples
of link building outreach
and what you can do to avoid these
sort of rookie mistakes that people make, okay?
So here's the first example as you can see on the screen.
And yeah, it's pretty bad.
Let's be honest, okay?
So let's start with the subject line.
The subject line has some weird file name in it here,
and it's named content contribution request.
It's really bad, okay?
This is not what you should do.
When you're trying to write a subject line for an email,
whether that's with link building average
or whether it's with sales, or whatever,
you want to peak a little bit of curiosity.
And this email definitely doesn't do it.
If you were scrolling through your inbox
and you saw this subject line,
most of the time webmasters are going to delete it.
The other thing as well, this email as you see here,
sent with MailChimp, which is not software
you should be using for cold email outreach.
If you're gonna use software,
use something like lemlist, like Mailshake,
or Pitchbox is another good example.
But don't be using MailChimp
because it's not designed for that.
It's designed for inbound marketing.
It's not designed for cold email outreach, okay?
All right, this is pretty embarrassing as well,
they actually got the mail merge wrong.
So you can see it says first name.
It should say my name or
my co-founder's name on the website.
So yeah, straight off the bat it's pretty bad.
The other I'd say, I don't know
if you can see here on the screen,
but there's a slight background here.
And that basically means that the design has a formatting.
So when you're doing cold email outreach,
you actually want to keep your emails in plain text.
Because if you use formatting and design,
and that sort of thing, it's a signal
that you may be sending a promotional campaign.
And if you're sending a promo then it's more likely
to land in spam, it's more likely to land
in the promotions tab in Gmail.
What you really want to do is to send a plain text email,
which you can do with lemlist, or Mailshake,
or that sort of software.
Okay, the text is kind of ironic here, like the copy,
"I'm sure you get a ton of spammy link submissions
"on your site."
This email's quite spammy in itself so
it's a little bit awkward in that way.
And yeah, also other things as well,
you want to avoid using exclamation marks,
because spam filters can pick up certain characters.
And if they see exclamation marks or the word free,
or any sort of signals like that,
the email service provider will usually mark it as spam.
And you can see this there's an exclamation mark here.
There's one here too.
Yeah, it's just really poor all around.
They also got the mail merge wrong here,
should say my name, again.
It's bad.
Don't do this, people.
Don't do this to yourself.
All right, next one.
Okay, again the subject line is pretty bad,
do you allow contribution to your blog?
It's grammatically wrong.
It should be contributions.
You can see the G Suite actually marked it as spam
straight away when it saw the email.
You see here it comes up with this gray banner here.
Also it's sent from a gmail.com account.
Which you really shouldn't do.
If you're gonna do cold email outreach,
do it properly and do it with your G Suite account
because your email deliverability
will be much higher with G Suite versus gmail.com.
Also if you do cold email with gmail.com,
first of all you're not gonna look very legit,
because you're not sending from a company URL,
but also if you're sending a lot of emails
from gmail.com then you're probably
going to get your account blocked
because it's a free account, Gmail doesn't like it.
And yeah, it's an easy way to get your account blocked.
Now let's move on to the actual copy of the email.
All right, so "My name is .."
"I'm the content manager,"
okay that's not that bad.
"Hi" is a little bit generic,
like there are ways he can grab someone's attention
much better than just saying hi.
Okay, blah, blah, blah, right.
Now here's some topics they've suggested.
First of all, this is a guest post outreach email.
I would recommend using the Skyscraper Technique.
It's much more efficient.
You don't have to keep producing.
You know, when you're doing guest posts
and you have to keep producing the content,
it might not be approved for a while,
it might not get posted by a webmaster for a while.
If you're using the Skyscraper Technique,
you just create one piece of content
and you build all the links to that.
So it's much more time efficient.
It's much more scalable.
And you don't have to wait for webmasters
to approve your content and makes some edits to it
and that sort of thing.
Yeah, it's also kind of rude.
It's a little bit rude.
Instead of saying, "Let me know,"
it should say, "Please let me know."
There's no thank you or anything like that.
It also says, "I would need a courtesy back to my website
"in a form of a link."
Okay, you would need or you want?
It's a little bit rude.
And there's definitely ways to be much more charismatic
and much more polite in your email copy.
Yeah, it's still really boring.
It's really generic.
It looks like a template.
It doesn't look good.
So yeah, that's some of the mistakes
people can easily make and quite often make
when they're doing email outreach.
Now, by the way, I don't want to say like I'm perfect
at writing cold email.
There's no such thing,
but I can definitely give you some pointers
in the way of how to optimize your campaign,
and just so you can see some of the results I'm getting.
This is a campaign I sent out previously.
You can see a 69% open rate, which is pretty high,
usually it's around 40 or 50%.
And you can see a 33% reply rate
to my cold email campaign.
That's pretty decent.
You know, if you look at the average link building campaign
now with the Skyscraper Technique,
I'd say the reply rate is usually around 8 to 10%,
if that sometimes, so this just gives you
an idea of some of the results I'm getting
from recent campaigns.
Now, here's an example of some of the reactions
I get as well so.
You know, some people absolutely love the outreach I do.
They appreciate it.
This is another one.
They said they usually delete these request emails,
but because of the humor I threw in
and the type of email copywriting I was using,
they actually responded to it.
So email copywriting, if you get it right,
and if you nail it, then it makes a huge difference,
and you will get a lot more replies.
You'll get a lot more results.
And you'll get more links out of it.
Which that's the goal of your campaign.
So even like a 10% improvement in your copywriting
will make a huge difference to your results.
So you know, especially if you're doing that
over the course of a year.
So let's get into some of the examples
of campaigns I've used previously, okay?
So this email campaign right here
is an SEO beginner's guide.
So that's what I was promoting in the Skyscraper campaign.
And yeah, it actually built a ton of links
just to this one piece of content.
So you can see like the subject line
is pretty conservative really.
It's nothing crazy, but it does describe
what the email's about.
It's not spammy.
It's not salesy.
If a webmaster sees it, okay, they know what email's about
and they're not gonna be misled when they read it,
which means they're not gonna be annoyed,
they're not gonna be irritated by the email.
They know exactly what it's about
when they click on it, okay?
And as I've shared before the 69% open rate
is actually pretty damn high for an email outreach campaign.
Now let's sort of dissect the elements of the email,
and I'll show you some of the techniques I've used.
So first of all, if you don't know what this is,
this is a mail merge.
So if I don't have the name for the person,
then it will say bacon instead.
And yeah, you can see
it's got competitor name, URL, et cetera.
So first of all, rather than the generic hi or hey,
or how're you doing, that sort of thing,
I've included how's it shaki'n bacon,
and yeah straight off the bat it's kind of funny.
I'm not saying I'm hilarious by the way,
you know, you're allowed to cringe if you're reading this.
But it does get a reaction of webmasters,
and it does grab their attention straight away.
And that's exactly what I want to do, you know?
When they're in their inbox and this email pops up,
they're gonna see a slight preview.
And the first thing they're gonna see
is how's it shaki'n' bacon, okay?
Now moving on.
What I like to do to get a reaction from webmasters
is to include certain puns and jokes
throughout the campaign.
And keep it on theme to the content.
So this is a beginner's guide to SEO,
and I've tried to include some SEO related puns
throughout the copy.
Which just makes it a different.
It differentiates the copy from other campaigns
that webmaster's gonna see.
And therefore it's gonna improve the reaction to it.
So things like white hat, as SEOs would say,
okay, that sort of thing.
Yeah, these sort of elements,
they differentiate your content.
The only thing you can see from the email campaign
is that it's very clean,
and it's not loads of bulky paragraphs.
Actually there's nothing longer than one line
across the whole content, so it's pretty clean,
it's pretty easy to read,
you can scan through it very quickly.
And it's also straight to the point and direct, okay?
Yeah, the other thing I'd say that I've done
is that I've made it win-win.
So you can see from the other two campaigns,
they didn't offer anything in return.
So if I'm gonna spend my precious time
adding a link on my website to your content,
I want to know a good reason why.
Because if I get 20 emails, or 30 emails, or 40 emails
from other websites asking me to add content,
I'm not gonna have time do all of that.
And actually I'm gonna be pretty annoyed
if people keep asking me.
So if you can make it win-win
and you can offer like a social media share,
if you can offer maybe a promotion
on your email newsletter for the webmaster,
maybe even you could chuck in a free back massage,
whatever you have to do to get the link in.
But whatever you do, just make it win-win.
And then therefore it's a fair trade-off,
and straight off the bat you're building a good relationship
with the people you're contacting.
Other stuff as well,
I just kept it really informal and lighthearted.
So you can see like how's it shaki'n', fantabulous resource,
jump for joy, hasta luego,
all these elements of the email copy
are ways of keeping your email really informal.
And that's good because then you don't sound too robotic.
You actually sound like a human, rather than some sort of
link building robot that's just demanding links.
And yeah, it keeps, the tone of the email
very lighthearted.
Now the other thing I'd say as well
is that when you're creating an email campaign,
you want to have like
some follow up messages as well afterwards, okay?
So this is step three.
This is actually I sent a followup after five days
and then one final follow up after another five days.
Okay, so what you can do in your email followups
is include a joke or something like that.
It's not groundbreaking,
but it definitely makes a difference.
So keeping it on theme again with SEO,
say what did the victim say to the stalker,
as you see there.
Because I'm chasing them for a link.
I keep messaging them.
It's kind of ironic in the copy
that I've talked about in SEO.
Okay, so yeah, other things as well, like peace out
is just a better way of saying you know thank you
or see you later, rather than the generic stuff
that everyone else is sending.
So the other thing as well, is on this final followup,
I've made sure the webmaster knows
I'm not gonna keep messaging them,
keep bombarding them with emails every single week.
You can see I've put, "If not, don't worry-
"this is the last email you'll get from me."
So if they're not interested it's okay,
I'm not gonna email you and keep chasing you for a link.
So yeah, that's basically it.
It's very simple and it's very easy,
but it's also very easy to get it wrong.
So don't just keep yapping on and demanding links
and that sort of thing.
Keep it straight to the point.
Don't waste anyone's time.
Keep it lighthearted, be informal
and you should see much better results.
Okay, so that pretty much wraps it up
for this email copywriting for link building outreach video.
Basically I just want to summarize,
so when you're writing your email,
keep it short, follow up, engage the webmaster,
and use plenty of humor too, okay?
What you definitely don't want to do
when you're writing an email outreach campaign
is you don't want to be rude.
You don't want steal value from people.
You got to make sure it's win-win.
You don't want to keep yapping on and on.
You can see from the first couple of bad examples I used
that there were tons of paragraphs
and it was a lot of extra stuff
that people were talking about that they didn't need to.
And just whatever you do, make sure it's interesting
and fun to read.
Don't make it boring because if it's boring
it won't grab attention,
it won't be interesting for someone,
and it just makes it much easier to ignore, okay?
By the way, if you need any help with link building outreach
then just comment below with your questions
or email me via me@juliangoldie.com.
I'm always happy to help.
I'm always happy to talk about link building.
I'm a bit of a geek like that.
But yeah, feel free to ask any questions,
and I'll be happy to help.
All right, thanks for watching.