How Hunter Got 100+ Mentions in 3 Months With Cold Outreach

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Google ranking aspects are constantly changing, but links stay one of the most critical factors  used by search engines.

If you want your home page’s pages to position in search and entice tons of organic visitors, you will undoubtedly need links.

Great links are like “votes”, which help search engines determine the best content to show for specific search queries.

There’re tons of link building strategies  you can try depending on your goals and needs. With some strategies, you can get those important “votes” and increase recommendation traffic and gain more visibility for your company.

From Hunter, we’re continuously improving our hyperlink profile and getting a lot more visibility for our brand name. We’ve tested plenty of link-building strategies, plus there’s one that demonstrated us the best results — link building via “best” listicles.

In less than three months, we got 96 new links from 54 domain names , were pointed out in 33 new product entries , and improved our positions in seventeen listings .

How did we do it? Read information, and I’ll teach you how we implemented this strategy step-by-step.

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First items first: What are “listicles”?

A “listicle” is an article made from a list — typically with some kind of additional detail below each item. This is a popular format to review services or products as it’s easy to gloss over to find important information.

Titles tell you what to expect (e. g., each title could be the title of the product or even service), and each paragraph/chapter has a similar file format, making it easy to evaluate many items quickly.

Here is a great example of a listicle created by HubSpot: Sales Prospecting: 26 Suggestions, Techniques & Equipment to Succeed.

This can be a review of the best methods and tools to get prospecting, which has a comparable structure and approach to each product.

Why is it essential for you to get showcased in listicles?

Listicles are effective tools for product comparison and indie views on particular products or services.

Think of: You’re new to product sales prospecting. You barely know anything in regards to the popular tools in the marketplace, and you need to find a very good one for your team. To get some information regarding the topic you don’t know much about, you typically go to Google and type in something like “best prospecting tools” or “best product sales prospecting tools review. ”

You click “search” plus stumble upon a similar search result page which usually consists mainly of listicles:

best prospecting tools search results

At Seeker, our key product is related to sales recruiting, and we wanted to be there in many listicles (especially those that generate high organic traffic).

By appearing within those listicles, you can find:

  • A lot more visibility for your brand name:   Just imagine someone searching for “best [your product/service]. ” You appear number 1 on Google in the first independent listicle and are also mentioned in all best positions in the listicles below.
  • New backlinks:   By appearing in those listicles in 95% associated with cases, you’ll get one or a couple of backlinks aimed at your website (only in rare instances do editors not include external links).

Additionally, there are cases when you can end up being already featured within the listicle of “10 Best [Tools/Products] for XYZ” as the #10 item that gets minimum visibility. So , your own goal might also end up being to improve your position because listicle.

Today, let’s jump directly into the exact steps and strategies that will help you to obtain dozens of mentions in the listicles in no time.

Step 1 : Collect prospective customers for outreach.

The first step for this strategy would be to find all of the prospects relevant to outreach for the mention in the listicle.

You can find two approaches to get it done: manual and automated.

Using a guide approach, you Google all searches associated with your product or service along with modifiers.

For example: “best + [your product category]”   or “top tools to get [your product category]. ”

The most popular modifiers to find listicles would be:

  • Best
  • List
  • Tools
  • Top
  • Software
  • Review
  • Totally free
  • Toolkit
  • Services

You can use these modifiers in combination with your product or service group.

At Seeker, we created a basic spreadsheet that outlined everything relevant to the product terms and also a list of modifiers that can be used with those terms. Then, the most successful combinations like “best tools for e-mail lookup” or “best free software in order to verify email” generate.

You might prefer using an automated approach, that allows you to find more potential clients in less time (compared to Googling it all manually).

You need an Ahrefs  account for it. If you don’t have a membership, there is a $7/week demo, so that might be enough for you to find all the prospects you need.

In Ahrefs, enter your keywords into the Keywords Explorer  and foreign trade the results in CSV.

ahrefs keyword searcher for hunter Repeat it for all of the keyword ideas a person generate with your spreadsheet. Then, merge just about all CSVs you gathered with Ahrefs in one.

In the merged CSV, be sure to remove duplicates  (from this point, I suggest using Google Sheets). Right here, you can find a quick information on how to remove them.

After that, it’s time to do some manual work, which is a bit time-consuming but very satisfying in the end.

Open each URL you exported. Remove the irrelevant ones or those that are not listicles. Give a sequence tag for every email. You’ll use it to personalize outreach.

In our situation, we used 4 key tags:

  • Hunter not mentioned (our product is not really mentioned in the listicle)
  • Hunter mentioned below (our product’s position is below #1 in the listicle)
  • Hunter mentioned #1 with no link (no need to message the product, only request to add a backlink)
  • Hunter stated #1 with a link (no need to get in touch with this website)

email list for outreach campaign for hunter Apart from adding a sequence label for each relevant listicle, you’ll want to add a word of personalization for your spreadsheet that you’ll be using in your automated outreach sequence as an icebreaker.

This is exactly what it looked like in our spreadsheet:

email list for outreach with qualifier for hunter

I recommend exporting from Ahrefs month-to-month traffic and website authority of the Web addresses you collected. In order to to set your team’s priorities better. You need to focus on the webpages with the highest visitors and highest site authority.

When you complete this step, is actually time to find decision-makers in those companies and their emails.

As we observed, the highest response price for the listicle outreach was from the blog editors and articles managers, so I suggest focusing on these placements. In small companies, it could be marketers and business owners.

It is simple to find the full name from the decision-maker from a specific company just by checking the company’s LinkedIn user profile.

Once you know the full name of your possibility, enter it in E-mail Finder  along with a business domain. You’ll get a verified email address within seconds. With Email Finder, you can search 25 emails/mo for free.

how to find someones email for outreach campaign One more quick way to find the email addresses of the listicle authors is to use Author Locater. If you install a free Chrome extension, you are able to simplify the email lookup process even more.

Just open the particular listicle URL and click on the extension image. You’ll get the email deal with of the listicle author.

finding an authors email for outreach Add columns to your spreadsheet, such as the prospect’s title, company, and email address. You’ll use it later to personalize outreach.

Note:   If you find emails with other suppliers, verify them. Using unverified   emails could cause bounces ,   which can hurt your own deliverability rates.

Step 2: Get ready email copy.

Now, it’s time to prepare an email duplicate for your cold outreach.

It’s essential to segment your outreach sequences, personalize your own emails on a higher level, and provide maximum worth to your prospects.

For our outreach, we all created three sequences:

  • Those who didn’t mention our product
  • Those who mentioned our product but below other products
  • And for those who mentioned but failed to link back to all of us

Here is a good example of the email we delivered for those listicles that will mentioned other items from our niche but didn’t mention us.

There’re a few critical things to include in your email copy whenever reaching out to listicles:

  1. Short plus catchy subject series.   No one will ever respond to you if nobody opens your e-mail in the first place. Thus, the first thing to do while focusing on a new cold email campaign is to generate the perfect subject range. Keep it short and catchy so your reader isn’t overwhelmed  or even lost. Instead, get them to intrigued  and involved.
  2. Fast intro and catchy opening line.   After the issue line, the starting line is the second most crucial sentence  in your cold email. Since you wrote a successful subject line and produced prospects open your email, the next step would be to make them read your message. If you begin with something blurry, dull, and generic, it’s possible you’ll never get a response from your prospect. With this step, it’s necessary to add a personalized icebreaker. (This is the reason we all added this personalized line about each article to our Search engines Sheet earlier. )
  3. Customize at scale along with custom attributes.   When you send out dozens of emails at the same time, it might be time-consuming to obtain all manually. The following is where cold outreach automation tools come in handy. Create a spreadsheet with all data to customize your emails then add custom attributes to email copy. Your emails will be personalized on a higher level instantly, and you don’t need to perform tons of manual work.
  4. Provide value in return.   On the phone to ask a unfamiliar person for an offer but not give anything in return. Offer them the option to participate in your affiliate program, or even help with the content update or promotion. Consider anything that can bring them value.
  5. End your e-mail with a powerful CTA.   It’s essential how you finish your emails  as it directly impacts the response rate. Inquire an open-ended query that requires no time to get an answer. Make it clear plus straightforward.

Step 3: Set-up outreach marketing campaign.

Cold outreach is a time-consuming process, but when you find the right method of automate it, you will not need to spend very much time on your strategies.

For our listicle outreach campaign, we knew two stuff we planned to perform:

  • We would have to send highly-personalized email messages to our prospects.
  • We would need to send out follow-ups as they significantly increase the response price (typically).

When you have hundreds or even thousands of prospects to outreach, the thing that you don’t need to do is to write each and every email from scratch.

Also, you might find it overwhelming to remember when you really need to follow up with every prospect. When you have several follow-up for each, doing the work manually may sound like a nightmare.

So , this is the stage where you need to make use of intelligent automation.

For the listicle outreach, we used Advertisments, a free tool that helps to automate frosty emailing directly from your own Gmail account.

As I mentioned above, all of us used custom attributes to automate customization at scale. You need to spend time collecting most of data for customization before the outreach. Then, you just import it from your spreadsheet and have highly-personalized emails in one click.

Here is how the final email we sent looked: private and relevant to the chance.

We also added two automated follow-ups to the sequence that will used the personalization through the spreadsheet. The guideline was to send the 1st follow-up in 3 days to all people who didn’t respond, and a 2nd in 6 days after the initial email.

When scheduling cold follow-ups, it might be essential to:

  1. Not schedule too many follow-ups.   Our crucial  principle is to focus on creating irresistible emails instead of adding too many follow-ups. So we recommend restricting it to 3 follow-ups for your frosty email campaigns. If you are sending too many follow-ups to someone who’s by no means heard about you, you may seem like an annoying  person and damage your brand popularity.
  2. Utilize the same thread for all those emails.   This way, prospects rapidly get reminded about the offer from the prior email. Moreover, you can use follow-ups to continue informing the story or providing additional benefits, in cases like this.
  3. Remember a sending timetable.   According to many studies, once you automate outreach, you make sure you exclude out of your sending window weekends and public holidays.

Step 4: Become proactive in negotiations.

Your cold outreach campaign would not end when you hit “send. ” Your negotiation skills  and proactivity determine how effective your outreach advertising campaign will be.

In the perfect world, each answer you receive to the listicle outreach strategy looks like this:

The thing is we don’t reside in a perfect world, and most of the prospects will attempt to get more benefits for you personally in exchange for a hyperlink, product mention, or even position upgrade. Therefore , be ready to bargain!

Here are a few guidelines that helped us to get the most mentions after receiving answers from our prospects:

  1. Be quick and provide what you offered right away.   It doesn’t mean you need to skip sleep and update your mailbox regularly. Just solution as soon as you see an email.
  2. Be flexible.   If you contacted a DR 90 site and the traffic to the desired listicle is 1K sessions, be versatile in negotiations. A person want to lose a “big fish. ”
  3. Take a step for them. You get more likelihood of being featured if you provide even more value in return. Offer to share content after the upgrade or give free consultation on something you’re good at.
  4. Don’t forget to follow-up.   Ensure that you schedule manual follow-ups  for those who showed attention. Sometimes, people are just busy at the moment you send an email or can forget about the discussion. It’s OK. Just be sure to follow up relating to your conversation gently. You may use Gmail functionality in order to snooze conversations and get a reminder to follow up on a specific day.
  5. Monitor all negotiations.   Update your spreadsheet regularly and keep track of all negotiations. If you have too many leads to handle, use a CRM.

Link building via “best” listicles is an effective strategy that can help to get tons of mentions and hyperlinks for your business — if you do it correct.

Make sure to invest enough time researching your potential prospects and gathering in-depth information on all of them.

Prepare e-mail sequences that are exclusive and relevant to every segment, and include ice breakers plus information pertinent to bring value to your potential customers.

Automate routine work by using tools for cold outreach, and at the same time, invest as much time since needed on discussions.

Hopefully, certainly begin to see powerful results from your listicle outreach almost instantly.

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