Writing outreach emails should be a daily activity for you if you want your website to rank higher in Google. Unfortunately, because so many companies need to write outreach emails, blogs and other websites are often inundated with them.
Worse, when the emails are poorly written, they may be ignored entirely. So how do you get your outreach email read and-more importantly-get the follow through you need? Let’s take a look.
1] The Importance of Outreach
When we talk about outreach, we’re talking about what should be a fundamentally important part of your SEO strategy: Getting more websites to link to your website. The number of places that link to your website is one of the ways that Google and other search engines decides how important and trusted your website is.
Back in the early days of the internet, getting backlinks was easy. If you paid a little bit of money, you could get links to your site popped into giant lists. These days, search engines have gotten smarter, and in order for backlinks to be effective, they need to make their way into actual articles on reputable sites.
That’s where outreach comes in. If you want a blog or news website to link to you, you need to reach out to them, let them know who you are, and make it worth their while.
2] Reach Out
The first step to crafting a killer outreach email is to decide who to email in the first place. Your best bet is to look for blogs in your niche who accept guest posts.
Guest posts are posts that you would write that would intentionally lead back to your website, and they are one of the best ways to get authoritative backlinks to your website.
Why? When you write a guest post, or have on written with you in mind, you control the message that’s being spread about your brand and who the message is targeted towards. This helps you not only get people to click through to your website, but it gets the right people to click through.
Offering to write a guest post is also one of the best ways to keep your email relevant to the bloggers you’re contacting. Just asking them to link to you doesn’t work, because it doesn’t do anything for them.
But if you offer them quality content for their website that actually makes sense for their brand, you may help drive traffic to them-and if they think that will happen, they’re much more likely to say yes.
3] Let Them Know Who You Are
No one wants to read spam. One of the best ways to get flagged as a spammer is to send an email that seems to come out of the blue or seems to bury the lead. Bloggers get tons of emails every single day, so if you want to stand out among the crowd, you need to let them know who you are.
One of the best ways to do this is by crafting a good headline for the email you send them. Something like “SEO of Company A Looking to Write Guest Post for Your Blog” is a to-the-point heading that immediately tells the blogger who you are and why you’re contacting them.
This helps you build trust with them before they even open the email: They don’t feel like you’re trying to trick them into something.
4] Make It Worth Their Time
When you’re contacting a blogger asking them to let you write a guest post on their website, you have to keep in mind that you are asking them for a favor and you are asking them to take time out of their schedule for it.
Since they don’t know you from Adam and have no reason to do you favors, you need to show them, right off the bat, why it’s worth their time.
One of the best ways to do this is to propose a couple of different guest post titles. Do your research ahead of time, and ensure that the titles you’re proposing actually fit into their niche (but could reasonably link to your website).
The other key to making the outreach email worth their time is to keep it short and to the point. No one wants to read 1,000 words on who you are, what you do, and why it matters to you.
They want to read what you can do for them, and they want it in easily-digestible, bite-sized pieces that they can read on their phone while walking to the bathroom.
As long as you keep your email short and to the point and make it worth the reader’s time, bloggers will start to pay attention to you.
You won’t land a guest email every time you send an outreach email out, but as you hone your craft and send more, you’ll start to gain some traction. And once you gain some traction, your website will as well.
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