{"id":655,"date":"2017-10-31T14:25:20","date_gmt":"2017-10-31T08:55:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.kmbrian.com\/?p=655"},"modified":"2020-12-03T22:41:29","modified_gmt":"2020-12-04T04:41:29","slug":"customer-link-building","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/kmbrian.com\/blog\/customer-link-building\/","title":{"rendered":"[Case Study] How I Use Mailshake to Save a Ton of Time on Link Building Campaigns"},"content":{"rendered":"

I build links for a living, and actually, I\u2019m pretty good at it. <\/span><\/p>\n

One of the biggest problems with truly white hat outreach campaigns is the absolute massive amount of time that they take. <\/span><\/p>\n

If you want to rank your site<\/a> in any moderately competitive niche these days you need to create remarkable content and build links from real sites that actually send traffic to your site.<\/span><\/p>\n

In this post, I\u2019m going to show you the exact process I used to build an insane number of links in a short period of time and used Mailshake to save myself a ton of time in the process!<\/span><\/p>\n

The Background <\/b><\/h2>\n

I wanted to rank my website (smbclix.com) for the keyword \u201cAdWords optimization\u201d and I created a huge infographic that was jam-packed with <\/span>actionable Adwords optimization tips<\/span><\/a> for my outreach campaign. <\/span><\/p>\n

I\u2019ve used infographics<\/a> to build really great links for both my own and my clients\u2019 campaigns in the past and a huge fan of the <\/span>Guestographic Method<\/span><\/a> that Brian Dean wrote about and this case study is heavily based on that method with a few of my own little tricks thrown in, the biggest trick of all is using Mailshake for the outreach.<\/span><\/p>\n

I\u2019ll get to how Mailshake saved me so much time later in the article, but first, you need to understand some of the other key components for the success of the campaign.<\/span><\/p>\n

The Strategy <\/b><\/h2>\n

If you are going to reach out to website owners to promote your content, then you need to build a solid list of people to reach out to. To do this you can use \u2018<\/span>The follow the leader approach\u2019<\/b> and the <\/span>\u2018synonym method.\u2019<\/b><\/p>\n

The follow the leader approach is based around finding sites that have already linked to the same content (or very similar) as your content (in this case my infographic). For this to work, you will need a backlink tool such as Ahrefs or Majestic SEO. <\/span><\/p>\n

Here\u2019s the step by step:<\/span><\/p>\n

My infographic was about Google Adwords, so I found other websites that have already featured infographics about AdWords. <\/span><\/p>\n

One of the strongest ranking factors used in Google\u2019s algorithm is links pointing to a post from other sites, so if a site is ranking for a keyword like \u201cAdWords infographic, then it\u2019s likely this site has some great links from some equally good sites and these sites are obviously already interested in AdWords infographics, as they\u2019ve already linked to the sites ranking on page one.<\/span><\/p>\n

So I started by Googling \u201cAdwords Infographic\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\"Adword<\/p>\n

You can see from the results that the first result is a post from Wordstream. <\/span><\/p>\n

To find some link prospects to reach out to, I found out who linked to the Wordstream post. I did this by taking the URL that was ranking and entered it into Ahrefs:<\/span><\/p>\n

\"Aherfs<\/p>\n

As you can see from my screenshot, there are 56 websites linking to this post, that\u2019s 56 prospects who\u2019ve already linked to someone else\u2019s AdWords infographic, that might also like my AdWords infographic!<\/span><\/p>\n

\"Aherfs<\/p>\n

From here I clicked on the referring domains and filtered them down to sites that gave a dofollow link only and sorted them into the site with the highest domain rating first so that I\u2019m targetted the sites that were most valuable first:<\/span><\/p>\n

\"Referring<\/p>\n

From there on I started to find the author of the post and build a list of all their contact details that I used to <\/span>reach out to them and secure a mini guest post<\/span><\/a> on their site using my infographic as linkbait. <\/span><\/p>\n

The great thing about the follow the leader approach is that there are endless opportunities. In this example, I only showed you the links pointing to the very first result, but each result on the first page will produce endless link opportunities, as they all have links pointing to them from relevant sources, meaning I have hundreds of link prospects that I can find just from the first page alone. <\/span><\/p>\n

I\u2019m not going to get into the nitty-gritty on how I find the authors email addresses in this post, as there some awesome posts highlighting it <\/span>and here\u2019s one of \u2018em!<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n

The other method I used to build a list of prospects for my guestographic outreach campaign was to target other agencies like mine that I wasn\u2019t in direct competition with, who might be likely to share content based on Adwords. <\/span><\/p>\n

So, for instance, I don\u2019t have an office in New York and I\u2019m unlikely to get clients from there, but there are plenty of other AdWords agencies based in New York, that likely write about AdWords on their blog and might want to feature my infographic. I built this list by using search operators such as:<\/span><\/p>\n

Keyword + city + blog<\/span><\/p>\n

Keyword + city + bloggers<\/span><\/p>\n

Inurl:blog city + keyword<\/span><\/p>\n

Intitle:blog city + keyword<\/span><\/p>\n

Then I used cities where I wasn\u2019t the competition and keywords that were relevant such as AdWords, google adwords, ppc, pay per click etc.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"Adword<\/p>\n

I usually use all of the search operators and go through as far as page 3 or 4 until I\u2019ve found about 30 opportunities per city, during my regular research. For this task, \u00a0I found relevant posts about AdWords on their site and recorded all of their details including the post URL and the author’s email address until I had a huge list of prospects that looked something like this:<\/span><\/p>\n

\"List<\/p>\n

It\u2019s important to note that I usually outsource the link prospecting<\/a> tasks to a freelancer on a site like Upwork<\/a> or PeoplePerHour, this way I spend more of my time on the outreach portion of the campaign.<\/span><\/p>\n

Once I built my list, I continued with my outreach campaign and in case you haven\u2019t already figured it out, Mailshake helped me save a great deal of time on this portion of the campaign!<\/span><\/p>\n

The Mailshake Edge <\/b><\/h2>\n

Before I found Mailshake and started taking advantage of its <\/span>awesome features<\/span><\/a> I used to be able to send only 10-15 emails per hour maximum. <\/span><\/p>\n

This meant that with an email list of 200 prospects to reach out and pitch my content to, it usually took me an average of 13-20 hours to reach out to everyone on my list. I used to use Gmail\u2019s canned responses which saved me a bit of time, but to send a personalized email<\/a> each time, I found it very hard to get past the 15 emails per hour mark. <\/span><\/p>\n

With Mailshake I could send 200 personalized emails<\/a> in about an hour, plus the follow-up sequences I could set using the tool probably saved me triple the amount of time! <\/span><\/p>\n

The main way that Mailshake saved me time was through its ability to bulk upload the email list. Mailshake then generates the emails for you, you can ensure that each email is correct and personalize as needed. The ability to personalize the email got me some great responses, such as this one:<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cHey Michael, first I applaud your personal outreach email…way better than the generic crap I get most of the time. Lol\u201d<\/i><\/strong><\/p>\n

Before each email is sent from Mailshake you can review it and personalize it. My emails included the person’s name, a link to the relevant content piece on their site and some more personalized details. By being able to personalize each email further, it increased the response rate. So, for example, I could add a line to my <\/span>Email template<\/span><\/a> that showed them I looked at their content. \u201cI especially loved the part where you describe how XYZ increased ABC\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

This handy video goes through the whole process of setting up your outreach campaign on Mailshake, including adding your list and personalizing each email.<\/span><\/p>\n