Hey, it's Sam Oh and welcome to the third lesson in the vetting module.
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.
We'll be talking about three different link outreach approaches, dive deep into what
I think is the best one, and we'll end it off with a tutorial on how you can write good outreach
templates without it sounding too templated.
I'll see you there.