Tips for Earning Quality Backlinks via Email Outreach

The role of link-building in business success is hard to undervalue. The more mentions you get from diverse and trusted sites, the higher your domain authority and the more people can come to your website. As a result, the more links you have, the more traffic you drive and the higher your site ranks in search engines. 

Today, there are quite a few common link building strategies. Namely, you can start building your backlink profile by:

• Looking for broken links and suggesting replacements;
• Asking webmasters to link your unlinked brand or content mentions;
• Writing guest blog posts for trusted and relevant sites;
• Creaking share-worthy content, such as studies, infographics, etc.
• Securing editorial links through high-quality, value-driven content that websites naturally want to reference.

These and other strategies work if you approach them right. Yet, email outreach still remains one of the most meaningful ways to build high-quality mentions. Email marketing can help you deliver personalized pitches to potential link donors, establish trust, and, thus, gain more mentions. Read on, and we will tell you how to use this approach to the maximum!

How to Identify Link-Building Opportunities

Identifying and capturing the right link-building opportunities can be a real game-changer for your outreach strategy. An efficient way to ensure that you come across the right opportunities is to place your focus directly on your primary competitors. Analyzing the backlink profiles of your competitors will help you see what link-building efforts work well in your niche and detect similar opportunities for your own brand.

You can use other backlink-checking tools for this purpose. One of the most famous ones is Semrush, but you can also find plenty of Semrush alternatives on Top 10 SEO Software. This is a reputable SEO software testing platform that shares fresh and objective reviews on various tools, so you can check it out to find a suitable solution for analyzing your competitors’ profiles.

Apart from analyzing your competitors, there are a few other ways to identify the right opportunities. First of all, monitor trusted industry publications and blogs. By doing so, you will be able to detect industry-relevant opportunities to guest post. Also, you can use social media channels to connect with other bloggers and influencers in your niche.

How to Outreach to Potential Link Donors

After finding perfect link-building opportunities, you can start reaching out to potential link donors via email. Before you get to it, we really recommend spending some time and building a comprehensive outreach list to make the process more controlled and effective. List all your potential donors with their contact details and conduct some research on each donor to know who you are reaching out to.

Another helpful tip for building your outreach list is to always walk the extra mile and find a personal contact for every donor. Simply put, you want to reach out to a specific person or role rather than just a generic email address like “contact@businessname.com,” “marketing@businessname.com,” “info@businessname.com,” and similar. By sending emails to such generic addresses, you always risk getting your email lost in a pile of others. However, if you reach out to an actual person, you are more likely to get some attention.

Finally, when you are ready to start crafting your emails, here are a few outreach tips that can help you stand out in your recipient’s busy inbox:

1. Personalize – Personalized emails grab attention and are more likely to be opened. Always use the first name of the person you are contacting and their company name. Then, use a custom opening tailored to your recipient. For example, congratulate them on a recent achievement, provide feedback on the recent content, etc. Always emphasize how the potential donor can benefit from linking to your content.
2. Make an offer – Craft a compelling and clear pitch offering the donor to guest post on their website or share your content through their social media. You can make an offer in your first message as long as it feels natural and unobtrusive. Or, sometimes, you may want to send one “feeler” email and send a second one with your pitch.
3.  Make it simple – If you want donors to link back to your content, you need to make it as simple for them as possible such as providing easy ways to convert Word to PDF for sharing. To do this, have clear instructions and anchor options ready and share them with potential donors.

How to Build Links From Your Email Marketing Campaigns

Apart from pitching your content directly to potential donors, you can also earn links through your email marketing campaigns. To do this, all you need is to showcase your best and most recent content and make it share-worthy for your subscribers.

Here are a few tricks to align your email marketing efforts with your link-building needs:

• Showcase your latest content – Always promote your latest blog posts and articles in your email marketing campaigns. This can help you get your best content noticed.
• Optimize your email signature – Every email you send can potentially bring you new mentions if you include links to relevant content right into your signature. This way, people who receive messages from you might check out your latest publications themselves and, hopefully, link back to them.
• Offer exclusive content – If the best way to gain quality backlinks is to provide valuable, unique, and shareable content, then offering exclusive ebooks, case studies, whitepapers, and similar content to your subscribers is a way to go. By making exclusive content offers, you can 1) get more subscribers and 2) get more mentions for your content.

How to Track Your Link-Building Results

When you finally achieve the desired results from your email marketing and outreach efforts, your work doesn’t stop there. Tracking and measuring the success of your link-building is crucial for identifying tactics that work well, detecting mistakes, and improving your strategy for maximized outcomes.

There are several crucial metrics that will interpret the success of your strategy:

• The number of referred domains – Generally, the more websites link to you, the better. Use Google Search Console to track the number of domains that refer to your website. However, pay attention not only to the quantity but also to the diversity of these mentions. When you get links from diverse sites, this shows your trustworthiness to search engines.
• Anchor text distribution – Anchor text is the clickable text that tells the reader what content they will find after clicking on a link. Ideally, you want to strive to have a natural variety of anchor texts, meaning that referred domains use different labels to link to your content. And you want to ensure that all anchor text is relevant to your content. To keep an eye on this metric, you can use an anchor text distribution analyzer by Small SEO Tools.
• Quality of backlinks – The quality of every mention is determined by a number of factors. These include how naturally the link occurs within the page context, how reputable the domain is, and how relevant the referring page is to the link destination. 

There are more metrics that can help you assess your efforts. So be sure to keep an eye on them all to ensure that your link building strategies bring the best results.

Additionally, be sure to analyze your key email marketing KPIs. Different marketing metrics can help you see which campaigns are driving the most traffic to your website. You can use this knowledge to fine-tune your campaigns and gain even more traffic and backlinks in the long run.

Conclusion

Earning high-quality mentions can sound like a no-brainer. Yet, this task always requires a lot of precision and dedication. Now, you know everything about how to discover the right opportunities and use email outreach to get the most out of your link building strategies. Use the knowledge and tips from this guide to craft an excellent backlink profile and grow your business!