Help with outreach emails for content marketing
-
Hello,
Could I get some feedback on how to make a good outreach email?
I'm using buzzstream and Rand's awesome whiteboard friday. Here's what I've put together:
Hi [first name] have you seen this [our niche] article?
Paragraph 1 (short paragraph) comments on what the person is involved in, and ask them how these things are going
Paragraph 2 (short paragraph) talks about how I've shared and retweeted their recent important posts.
Paragraph 3 (short paragraph) Asks if they would link to our article. This niche article is really useful and needed to these people.
Paragraph 4 (short paragraph) I'm not sure how to reasearch and put something interesting here.
[my name]
co-owner
[our website]
-
Thanks Chris,
I think I can adapt this to what we're doing.
This outreach seems like an art form.
Thanks again,
Bob
-
How's this instead?
I'm an amateur [niche] enthusiast and your article/comment on [website name & date] led me to do some additional research this past week. I ended up with a pretty detailed piece on [article topic] and I wondered if you have any thoughts on what I've included in it. [Short, concluding, light-hearted sentence that references something personal about the recipient.] [link]
-
Hi Chris,
Thanks, yes one paragraph sounds a lot better. How would you frame it if the article is unlike anything that they have, yet it is useful to them? Also, maybe instead of
"your article/comment on [website name & date] lead me to write this article on [article topic] this past week"
I could truthfully (I want to be honest) say that the there's a lack of good material on [niche] so I created this article.
Though that doesn't sound as good as what you wrote.
Your thoughts?
-
My thoughts are that's a lot of paragraphs and how many sentences are going to be in each paragraph. If it were me, I'd whittle it down to just a few sentences. For the best possible response, there's no way to get around customizing each email or doing some research on each recipient. I'd recommend something more stripped down--maybe more along these lines:
Hi [recipient]
I'm a budding young [niche] writer and your article/comment on [website name & date] lead me to write this article on [article topic] this past week. I really respected your [other relevant, highly shared, well thought out article] and I wonder if you have any thoughts on mine and what I included in it. [Short, concluding, light-hearted sentence that references something personal about the recipient.] [link]
Thanks,
-
Hi,
Ofcourse this is just my personal opinion about this. I personally always tried to ask the people to 'link' to the article but used words like: mention, refer or any word like that. Just to make a bit clear that your goal is also not 100% linkbuilding but also building a brand.
Next to that in paragraph I would not myself tell the recipient that I think it's really needed for this people, I think they'll have to make that up for themselves.Could you give us a complete example?
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Content Now
This is a general question, I was wondering if anybody had used content now before, either for content writing or link building. I've had them mentioned to me by a manager but would like to hear the opinions of others too. Has anybody used anything similar for creating content at all? Thanks
Link Building | | onlinechester0 -
Getting site ready for outreach for guest posting
Hello, We've decided to focus on guest posting for my client's site. What do we need to do to my client's website to be ready for guest posting. I assume those providing guest posting opportunities will look at our site and evaluate how good it is and how good our writing is. Here's what we're doing, and I'm wondering what's important 1. We went from a junky design to a pretty good one. 2. The logo is still average - we're thinking of upgrading it 3. all of the buttons for the store are still bad looking - we're going to make them pretty 4. All the category text was keyword stuffed and not good, we're rewriting all category text which is a huge effort 5. There was 20 short OK articles. We're making 5 long good ones to take their places. What are they going to look at to make their decision?
Link Building | | BobGW0 -
How do you use a blog to help SEO.
Hi, So you launch a blog on your website, fill it with lots of great content and update weekly with more great content. From what I know your looking to gain 2 things! 1. Users linking back to your blog and 2. Sharing the content on social networks. Building up social lists on Twitter, Facebook, Google+ etc so when you do post something new you have a hub of users to help push your post by sharing it on social networks which should also help to generate more backlinks. Is this the main purpose of a blog for SEO? Would anything else apart from the above effect the SEO for the site? Maybe the freshness of content also has a positive impact! Also if your blog is picking up lots of links, for this example lets say 100 links a month and the rest of the site outside of the blog is picking up 10 a month will the blogs power of picking up links effect the rest of the sites rankings, would you need to anchor text link out of the posts in the blog to make the most out of it? Cheers
Link Building | | activitysuper0 -
Forgot the name of a cool SEO Tool... Help!
I recently discovered a cool SEO tool. I didn't write it down, save it, bookmark, etc... And now I can't remember the name of the tool for the life of me, but I'd really like to use it again. I was hoping I could list of the features that I remember, and one of you Mozzers know what I'm talking about. It was a backlink analysis tool. It had a free version, and after you performed so many searches/searched so many backlinks, you had to pay. From what I remember it was a fairly nominal fee with the most popular package in around $25. The reason that I liked it so much was you could take an OSE csv file, dump it in there, and it would sort all of the links by link type, i.e, footer, comment, directory, etc... Then it would put it all into a nice pie chart for you and show you the % of the total links that each link type made up. It would also analyze the anchor text and would show you every anchor text used, and the % of the total each one made up.
Link Building | | stevefidelity0 -
Help me strategize!
Hoping for some guidance here. I am trying to place anywhere on page 1 in google organic search for my targeted term "Philadelphia wedding photographers." My blog posts rank very well for their own keywords/long-tails, but I'm having trouble ranking my homepage for my main aforementioned keyword. The frustrating part is that my SEOmoz domain/page authority should easily place me near the top of page 1, but instead I'm at the top of page 3 (down from page 2 last week). Bartlett Pair Photography Potential issues that I am aware of: #1 backlink anchor text is non-branded (branded is 2nd highest..I am working to fix this over time) Homepage itself is bare content due to nature of photography niche (though, my title tag and header focus on keyword and brand). I'm sure everyone will recommend that I increase homepage content, but virtually all competitors have a similar lack of homepage content so I don't understand how I rank so low given my page/domain authority. I've received 1 unnatural link notice from Google on March 22, 2012, but this is the only time, and really had no visible impact on my traffic. I have no local listing. I will remedy this in about 2 months when I have a physical location. Regardless, organic (non-local) listings are important to me because my physical location is 30 minutes outside city center. Is there a specific way that my website and Facebook page need to be connected in order to receive social graph juice? Currently, my website has some social plugins to like/share/tweet my content...and my FB page has a link to my website in the About section. (They also both use the same brand name). Most of my social activity (likes/shares) is directly on my Facebook fan page, and not on my website. Thank you in advance for any advice you may have! I'm hoping that someone is able to point out a strategy other than 1) more (branded) backlinks and 2) more homepage content!
Link Building | | bartlettpair-3287420 -
Risks with sharing my original content with other sites
We write our own unique content to our blog a few times a week. The content is written by professionals (doctors and such) and carries a bit of authority. We periodically get requests from other websites who want to post our content on their blog. We also find that some people will just go ahead and use our exact content (often with a link attribution), without asking permission. Is there any risk of us not getting credit for being the original source of the content if others use it in its entirety?Are there other risks? And more importantly, what should we do to make sure we're getting the SEO credit we deserve? Some ideas which have been discussed that may or may not have credence: Only let others use the exact content well after we've been crawled, so we'll be seen as the first publisher Only let people cite the introductory paragraph, with a link allowing them to read more at our site (with good anchor text) Require people to summarize our story, with a link for the full story Any thoughts would be appreciated. Thanks!
Link Building | | OneMedical0 -
Backlinks from websites with duplicate content
How does backlinks from websites with duplicate contect affect your rank in search engine? Is there any negative factor?
Link Building | | prunarevic0 -
What is the best wording you have seen in an outreach email?
We all get them and most of them are rubbish, very few of them have taken the effort to find out who they are emailing. So making it personal and doing some research first is essential but what about the wording of the email... can you share examples you like & that have had more success for you than others?
Link Building | | tonyatfat0