In case you missed yesterday’s Market Motive Webinar with Paul May and Captain Todd Malicoat, we’ve embedded the slides here.
The Webinar covered:
and more.
Big thanks to Todd and the Market Motive team for having us on – we had a great time.
Here at BuzzStream, we keep our ear to the ground about the latest and greatest in content promotion and outreach techniques. Here are 6 cool tips and tricks we’ve seen lately:
When I look at a new site for outreach, I ask myself, “Have they written about me before? How about my competitors? Have they written about my main topics previously?”
Now, I could read the whole blog, and for particularly high-value prospects, I’ll take this approach. Otherwise, I want to get the ‘greatest hits’ of my brand, my competitors, and my relevant topics.
To do this, I’ll use a site: query, with my brand name, my competitor’s brand names, and some relevant keywords. (When we do this for BuzzStream, we look for things like keywords like “influencer marketing” – you’ll have to play with the keywords to understand what’s too broad versus too narrow.)
Now I have a digest of what that blogger has written about my brand, my competitor’s brand, and my outreach themes, so I can refer to these in outreach.
While finding and engaging with people who follow your brand or client but haven’t yet linked on Twitter is well documented, this method is extensible to any social network. It’s harder to implement and requires a little legwork, but it can be very, very valuable, especially to brands with a strong Pinterest presence.
Download the Pinterest Bookmarklet from Aaron Friedman’s website. This bookmarklet gives you a list of users that have repined your content.
Today we return to the topic of better outreach emails.
Anatomy of a Terrible, Terrible Email
At BuzzStream, we periodically receive link outreach emails. Some are good – like high quality guest post pitches, where the author has built a relationship and made something excellent – and some are not so good.
Let’s look at one of the not-so-good:
I don’t want to out anyone, so I’ve removed the email and referenced sites.
Why didn’t this email get a link?
- It wasn’t personalized. Our blog is written by a person – not customer-service.
- It’s not positioned – the resources she suggests have nothing to do with our site, and frankly don’t belong there.
- And it’s not persuasive. I have no idea why these area code or zip code are better than any other resources.
One of the most frustrating parts about link development is low success & response rates. While this has many causes – including poor prospecting methods, low quality sites, bad timing, and more – it is often due to poor outreach email construction.
Most people don’t send persuasive emails. They just ask for a link.
This is a particularly extreme example from Rand Fishkin, but this is about how persuasive the average link building email really is:
From Rand’s Presentation at LinkLove 2012 Boston
Persuasive, personalized messages get dramatically better response rates than the standard, “I see you have a website. I’d like a link – can you hook it up?”
Fortunately, persuasion has been studied for years, and many experiments have been done.
The 10,000 pound Gorilla of persuasion studies is a book called “Influence: Science and Practice”, written by Professor Robert Cialdini, the Regents’ Professor of Psychology at Arizona State University.
In ‘Influence’, Dr. Cialdini writes about 6 persuasive triggers:
• Reciprocation
• Commitment and Consistency
• Social Proof
• Liking
• Authority
• Scarcity
Let’s look at these principles one at time and see how we can leverage them to improve our link development effectiveness:
