Thanks Isaac. In my experience, although the personalized emails can take a bit longer, the return has always been greater than blasting out less personalized ones. I think a big think to consider is creating a really good template for each so the personalization of each doesn’t take as long. You can focus more of your time and making each template unique.

I’ve tried blasting out more generic stuff on some harder projects to see if maybe that was what it’d take and I saw minimal returns and went back to the more personal touch and received promising email responses :).

I usually keep the follow up pretty simple. Just straight forward asking if they got my last email, and if not, that’s fine and just that if they can shoot me a reply regarding a link addition I’d appreciate it. I do it in the same thread personally so they can reference the first email to get the full context of everything. There’s other tactics I’ll use from time to time which is another post all together but generally if it’s a normal follow up, just a quick and to the point ask if they saw my last email and reiterate what I was asking about and that I hope they’ll get back to me soon.

Sorry I’m responding now, I thought I had but I just checked and I didn’t go through.

Thanks for commenting Filip. Not really any tools are required to do this. I conduct a lot of my outreach using “Buzzstream” but I followed these principles/tactics prior to having access to the tool, and yielded the same results.

I try to rely less on tools and more on practical thinking and tactics when outreaching for linking opportunities. Keep the tools for site prospecting and analysis.

I want to ask you.

Do you use specific tools during this process? And if you do, which ones do you use?

Kind regards,
Filip

Great post. Very interesting to get a peek behind the curtain about link building and the actual goings on.

I do high volume SaaS sales. I write emails all day, every day. Templates, cadences, tracking, etc. I would recommend that you shorten them up when possible. Keep in mind, (my guess) that like 60% of emails will be first viewed on a phone. You want something natural with the intro. Props to using the first name, Dale Carnegie would be proud.

“Hi Devin, I would like to discuss link building through your site. I work doing SEO for many domains other than and would like to speak with you to discuss opportunities between and .

If you can get me set with a link near the top of I’d like to have a quick discussion to return the favor by facilitating introductions to my other domain clients.

You available Tuesday at 2pm EST to speak with me?

Cheers,
Your name here
Your phone number”

Now of course, some of the verbiage above will be off as I am not specifically in your industry, but nonetheless, the above is me taking a crack at it, half cut on a Friday evening.

PS: Hellraiser pic is Boss.

I see. Thanks Devin for the response! 🙂 Helps a lot.

You’re welcome Emmerery. Mistakes often provide great opportunities if you can look at the bright side and learn from them. I like to do my follow up once a week. If I started the initial outreach close to a holiday, I might follow up a day early but normally, once a week; 7 days.

Having a brand/clients that can attract links on their own is way awesome and wish more brands could have that success! Glad you dug the advice. Thanks for reading/commenting Boris!