How My Internal SEO Process Works That Gets Quick Results For Guest Post Outreach

Geasy

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I’ve recently been working with a close friend to help him build an internal team to do content and links for his very successful but generally SEO-neglected service business. I thought it might be helpful and interesting to take you through a high-level overview of what all I did, and what the results have been so far (because it’s still pretty early).

If you do a lot of guest post outreach, this post will most likely cover a lot of stuff you already know, but still might be valuable, IDK.

I.The first thing we did is buy a new domain to use for outreach.YOU NEVER WANT TO USE YOUR MAIN IMPORTANT URL FOR COLD OUTREACH and I can’t stress that enough. For us, there were no .org or .net or .whatever-doesn’t-look-too-spammy for the brand, because the name of his biz is a fairly common business term.So we used the strategy of adding an HQ to the brand name or adding “mail” or “hello” or something at the front of the brand to create a new.com.I recommend connecting this to a Google Workspaces (or whatever the fuck they changed the name to this quarter) account.

II.Next, we needed to warm this bad boy up
, so it wouldn’t all go to the SPAM folder.I settled on using MailWarm.io, which you just connect through Gmail, and then they send emails from your account to their aged and trusted inboxes, mark it as important, and send replies.This, in theory at least, helps your brand new email address have a more trustworthy feel to it.I let that run for about a month before I did any actual outreach.

III.Next, I set up BuzzStream and connected it to the Gmail account. There may be better tools for this, but when I worked (extremely) briefly for Siege Media, I got a lot of experience using this tool, so it’s what I defaulted to.If you’re not familiar, BuzzStream will let you install a browser bookmarklet.

Then you just put together some ideal search operators to find sites that are potential guest post targets--something like:inurl:pricing “SaaS” if you’re trying to find sites that write about how to price a SaaS business, or that ARE SaaS businesses with a pricing page (or both).You can have fun with these searches to dial in the kind of sites you’re looking for.Then, when you visit a site, you can hit the BuzzStream bookmarklet and add it to your prospect list. The tool will try and give you as much info as possible about the email addresses connected to the domain, but usually, more research is needed...

IV.That’s where a tool like Hunter.io comes in
.You can put domains into this tool and it’ll spit out the email addresses it has discovered by crawling various pages on the site (and across the internet) and, worst case, will give you an idea of the pattern the company uses, such as {first initial}.{lastname}@company•com.Use this to put the email of the person you want to reach out to in the proper field in BuzzStream and it’s time to send an email.

V.In BuzzStream you can create a campaign. Then write an initial outreach email where you’re just trying to get them to respond to you with a “yes, I’m interested in working together” email. You should also write a follow-up email that goes out like 2 days after the initial email if there is no response. I expect a meager percentage of people to reply to the first email, and like 5x that percentage on follow-up sequences.BuzzStream can handle all of this.

1657975947448.png


VI.When you find a site you like, and you’ve got the email address of the person you want to reach out to, you just hit the “envelope” button on the BuzzStream bookmarklet, select your campaign, select the email that should go out, and make sure the [name] and [website] auto-filled sections are correct, so you don’t look like AN ABSOLUTE FOOL.Then you hit send.Then rinse and repeat times infinity.

VII.I didn’t want to be doing this forever (and it was not the plan to do this myself forever), so I went to onlinejobs.ph and posted an add for someone to run outreach. I ended up finding a very cool person from Thailand that I trained on this all in a few days (plus had him watch a few courses, like the AH Pro outreach module) and then turned him loose to send email all day every day.

VIII.The results so far have been stellar. Way better than I anticipated.I did spend quite a bit of time training him on how to hit back with some really great topic ideas.The best way to do this is to put the person that agreed to hear your topic ideas into Ahrefs, and then do a content gap analysis with two of their competitors. The tighter the competitor, the better this will work.You’ll get a bunch of keywords the competitor(s) rank for but your outreach... victim? target? doesn’t.Just pick two keywords and turn those keywords into articles. Then when you write back with the topic ideas you can be like “yo, your competitors both rank for this keyword and you don’t, so I thought I’d write a topic on THIS so you can rank too,” and they’ll probably appreciate that. (edited)

IX.You’ll probably have to pay for a few guest posts. That’s just the way the game is played. One thing I ran into that I think I have a pretty elegant solve for:A not insignificant percentage of the people who responded said they’d allow a guest post, but only if we exchanged one for them. I’m a certified member of the tinfoil hat club, so I don’t like to do these 1:1 exchanges.The absolute BEST way to handle this is to buy an expired domain in the niche, spend a little time and effort building it up, and then say you’ll do a guest post of them on X site that you have a relationship with, instead of an obvious 1:1.

If that doesn’t work or if you don’t have a sidekick site to do this to, just hit up one or two of the sites that responded “yeah we can do a guest post for $70” or whatever, and buy a guest post for the site that wants an exchange. It feels a lot safer than trying to play the exchange game.If I had a site write back that wanted an exchange and it was like, a legit DR 90 or something that I would kill to get a link on.

X.You may have a team for this, but delivering content can become problematic if you get a lot of “yes, we’ll take it responses” (death by success). I’ve had good luck using services to assign the approved topics to. It scales pretty well if needed, but nothing beats hiring someone to write you all the content you throw at them. But if you don’t have the budget, find a service that can handle one-off content.

XI.That’s basically it. Like I said if you’ve been exposed to this stuff before (and you’re still reading) you’re probably like “no duh, Markey.”But if you haven’t, this is a really solid, straightforward flow for getting guest posts at some scale. Holler at me with any follow-up questions and I’ll try and help you out.
 
I’ve recently been working with a close friend to help him build an internal team to do content and links for his very successful but generally SEO-neglected service business. I thought it might be helpful and interesting to take you through a high-level overview of what all I did, and what the results have been so far (because it’s still pretty early).

If you do a lot of guest post outreach, this post will most likely cover a lot of stuff you already know, but still might be valuable, IDK.

I.The first thing we did is buy a new domain to use for outreach.YOU NEVER WANT TO USE YOUR MAIN IMPORTANT URL FOR COLD OUTREACH and I can’t stress that enough. For us, there were no .org or .net or .whatever-doesn’t-look-too-spammy for the brand, because the name of his biz is a fairly common business term.So we used the strategy of adding an HQ to the brand name or adding “mail” or “hello” or something at the front of the brand to create a new.com.I recommend connecting this to a Google Workspaces (or whatever the fuck they changed the name to this quarter) account.

II.Next, we needed to warm this bad boy up, so it wouldn’t all go to the SPAM folder.I settled on using MailWarm.io, which you just connect through Gmail, and then they send emails from your account to their aged and trusted inboxes, mark it as important, and send replies.This, in theory at least, helps your brand new email address have a more trustworthy feel to it.I let that run for about a month before I did any actual outreach.

III.Next, I set up BuzzStream and connected it to the Gmail account. There may be better tools for this, but when I worked (extremely) briefly for Siege Media, I got a lot of experience using this tool, so it’s what I defaulted to.If you’re not familiar, BuzzStream will let you install a browser bookmarklet.

Then you just put together some ideal search operators to find sites that are potential guest post targets--something like:inurl:pricing “SaaS” if you’re trying to find sites that write about how to price a SaaS business, or that ARE SaaS businesses with a pricing page (or both).You can have fun with these searches to dial in the kind of sites you’re looking for.Then, when you visit a site, you can hit the BuzzStream bookmarklet and add it to your prospect list. The tool will try and give you as much info as possible about the email addresses connected to the domain, but usually, more research is needed...

IV.That’s where a tool like Hunter.io comes in.You can put domains into this tool and it’ll spit out the email addresses it has discovered by crawling various pages on the site (and across the internet) and, worst case, will give you an idea of the pattern the company uses, such as {first initial}.{lastname}@company•com.Use this to put the email of the person you want to reach out to in the proper field in BuzzStream and it’s time to send an email.

V.In BuzzStream you can create a campaign. Then write an initial outreach email where you’re just trying to get them to respond to you with a “yes, I’m interested in working together” email. You should also write a follow-up email that goes out like 2 days after the initial email if there is no response. I expect a meager percentage of people to reply to the first email, and like 5x that percentage on follow-up sequences.BuzzStream can handle all of this.

View attachment 218057

VI.When you find a site you like, and you’ve got the email address of the person you want to reach out to, you just hit the “envelope” button on the BuzzStream bookmarklet, select your campaign, select the email that should go out, and make sure the [name] and [website] auto-filled sections are correct, so you don’t look like AN ABSOLUTE FOOL.Then you hit send.Then rinse and repeat times infinity.

VII.I didn’t want to be doing this forever (and it was not the plan to do this myself forever), so I went to onlinejobs.ph and posted an add for someone to run outreach. I ended up finding a very cool person from Thailand that I trained on this all in a few days (plus had him watch a few courses, like the AH Pro outreach module) and then turned him loose to send email all day every day.

VIII.The results so far have been stellar. Way better than I anticipated.I did spend quite a bit of time training him on how to hit back with some really great topic ideas.The best way to do this is to put the person that agreed to hear your topic ideas into Ahrefs, and then do a content gap analysis with two of their competitors. The tighter the competitor, the better this will work.You’ll get a bunch of keywords the competitor(s) rank for but your outreach... victim? target? doesn’t.Just pick two keywords and turn those keywords into articles. Then when you write back with the topic ideas you can be like “yo, your competitors both rank for this keyword and you don’t, so I thought I’d write a topic on THIS so you can rank too,” and they’ll probably appreciate that. (edited)

IX.You’ll probably have to pay for a few guest posts. That’s just the way the game is played. One thing I ran into that I think I have a pretty elegant solve for:A not insignificant percentage of the people who responded said they’d allow a guest post, but only if we exchanged one for them. I’m a certified member of the tinfoil hat club, so I don’t like to do these 1:1 exchanges.The absolute BEST way to handle this is to buy an expired domain in the niche, spend a little time and effort building it up, and then say you’ll do a guest post of them on X site that you have a relationship with, instead of an obvious 1:1.

If that doesn’t work or if you don’t have a sidekick site to do this to, just hit up one or two of the sites that responded “yeah we can do a guest post for $70” or whatever, and buy a guest post for the site that wants an exchange. It feels a lot safer than trying to play the exchange game.If I had a site write back that wanted an exchange and it was like, a legit DR 90 or something that I would kill to get a link on.

X.You may have a team for this, but delivering content can become problematic if you get a lot of “yes, we’ll take it responses” (death by success). I’ve had good luck using services to assign the approved topics to. It scales pretty well if needed, but nothing beats hiring someone to write you all the content you throw at them. But if you don’t have the budget, find a service that can handle one-off content.

XI.That’s basically it. Like I said if you’ve been exposed to this stuff before (and you’re still reading) you’re probably like “no duh, Markey.”But if you haven’t, this is a really solid, straightforward flow for getting guest posts at some scale. Holler at me with any follow-up questions and I’ll try and help you out.
This is great, especially for someone with a team. This is actually not what I was expecting in the thread, thought the thread would be your inernal linking strategy.

Nevertheless, this is nice.
 
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