Question

Is genuine-quality-content-driven backlink outreach pointless? I've been trying to hire a VA on UpWork to reach out to blogs and websites that cover marketing topics, and see if they are interested in re-posting / linking back to our content (which is also all about marketing, but much more niche, as we talk about how you use comedy and humour to make your marketing land). Everyone I've spoken to so far, though, has told me they don't do manual outreach. As an example: "i don't get links through outreach, I prefer, safest and most genuine methods like, getting it through Social Bookmarks, Press Release, Blogs, Citations. These links are of high quality and they never get penalized. " Is this actually the case? Or am I just looking in the wrong places, for the wrong freelancers? We have content that I genuinely believe the right people could, and should, be interested in - can manual outreach deliver? Or is it all pay-to-play and / or Web 2. 0 these days?  

Answer 1

They are right and wrong because freelance platforms like Upwork don't have people who are willing to pay high pricing and still able to tolerate the zero results. Let's say, you paid someone $2k for outreaching 2000 blog owners and they did but got only 1 link. this is something that buyer won't like and will think that he kinda got scammed. So, people doing outreach are not in the position of giving you any guarantees and the best way to go for outreach is to hire a guy just for sending and responding emails till you get the link and manage the rest of strategy yourself !  

Comments

I'm glad it's still the right approach! That might be what we need to do! Thanks for the advice.  

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@bring yea pro way is to create the content that bloggers/website owner's would love to link or you could say feel proud to mention. That way, it takes time to research and create content but WIN WIN Best of Luck !  

Answer 2

I'd avoid those vendors but be prepared to pay $$$ for correct outreach

Answer 3

I do outreach for all of my clients and having good content makes my job so much easier. Getting links for a marketing agency though is going to be tough as everyone else is doing the same thing. I get emailed a few times a week with the skyscraper technique of “hey i saw you wrote about this, would you consider linking to this” If you are going to try to get links for your agency i would say to make sure you are personalising your outreach and dont follow brian deans methods as everyone else is using the same template. Hope that helps mate.  

Answer 4

Manual outreach works great; just ran our second campaign (first time we outsourced this activity) and were able to get some highly relevant links without money changing hands. A few folks asked for money or reciprocal links; in each situation we found good reason not to pay up. Average cost was about $50 per link, all things considered; we were flexible on DR (above a minimum) as long as the website was highly relevant, enjoyed traffic / rankings, and had no obvious spam signals.  

Answer 5

If you want manual outreach done right, you do need the right person (or team) to be doing it. The average VA won’t be able to do it at scale, with enough personalisation and give off enough of a “human connection” if you get what I mean. Sounds a bit wishy washy but makes the difference. Same reason my team adapted our link building and could do PR for Ja rule and get him in the door with producers and the likes of Forbes (we got him into the summit for instance). Needs a very specific and dynamic approach. And the fact your company is related to comedy/humour - that should reflect in your outreach. Using funny puns, a meme in the follow up , all these small touches make a difference

Answer 6

No, that's not the case. Social bookmarks and citations are cheap and easy, but have low value. Press releases are worthless - anyone selling that for SEO is someone you should not hire for anything. You may just be aiming too low. What you are describing is time consuming and difficult, and getting ROI can be very hit or miss. Pros at this - which I am not - can be quite expensive.  

Answer 7

Thanks for your advice everyone. I'm thinking the easiest thing - actually - is just to use SEMRush's backlinks feature to generate a list of prospects based on a given keyword, and then send emails to each prospect that are - genuinely - from me (and tailored), instead of outsourced to someone else. And only when I've got the messaging honed and we're getting a good response, at that point I'll maybe get someone to come into the office and do what I've been doing. Ridiculous approach? I feel like in this space, where spam is flying around left right and centre, one genuine outreach email would be just as powerful as 1000 outsourced potentially spammy (and if not spammy, very expensive) ones. What do you think?  

Comments

Been Doing it this way (by hand, on a personal, genuine level) for 15 years. Most effective way, especially if you are the owner or a key staff person at the company/website you are doing it for. As you correctly said, once you have it waxed, you can teach someone else in your company to do it, but it requires an intelligent approach to get the really great results.  

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@haemophilic for you, what's a good hit rate? I used the SEMRush tool to send out about 100 emails yesterday - have had a couple of people reply, all trying to sell me links, but managed to get one of them to agree to link to us so long as we link to a (different) article of theirs elsewhere on our site. So I guess that's a 1% "success" rate. Is that good? Or bad? (I realise that's barely any data to go on - but just wondering what's a good benchmark for this kind of thing).  

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@bring Ah, a list of opposition site's backlinks is probably not going to result in a high hit rate for many reasons - its important to try to get the links from those sites, but I don't think I would send each of those a highly personalised request. I tend to look for opportunities outside the obvious (competitor backlinks etc. fall into the obvious). Look for non-competing sites in your niche (preferably that don't link out to every site that asks for links) and then offer them a compelling reason to link to you (be it an equitable type exchange of articles or a link to content that would really interest their site visitors). I also usually satart with an intro mail as to who I am and try to establish a rapport / correspondence, and then ask. PS: And please be careful who you pay for links! Those links are just too easy to get so G probably doesn't give any benefit for them at best, and if you overdo that, you will eventually lose rankings. I hope I answered your question?