Backlink Outreach Recipe

Backlink Acquisition

A backlink is a link to your website from another website, simple. Why does this matter, because that link is a vote of confidence in Google’s eyes that your website actually knows a thing or two about what it’s saying.

Similar to a recommendation, if you got a recommendation from a well known CEO vs a random person others will value more if they say you got recommended by other high calibre people. In Google’s eyes

If you’ve spent a minute doing link acquisition it’s basically people spamming everyone with templated boilerplate messages that anyone can figure out from a mile away. For this reason most of your backlink collaboration emails would end up in spam.

So the alternative is to genuinely care about the authors content, and the way you do that is by reading the content, understanding it and building a conversion around that with the author so it feels very personalised.

But if i’m not wrong you don’t have 300 hours a day to read 100s of blogs to create personalised messages about, and anyone who does will charge you a kidney.

This is where SmartWriter comes in, it uses AI to contextually understand the blog, context and content - after which it’ll create a hyper unique personalised message that looks as if you’ve spent 30-45 minutes actually read the authors blog when all you did was simply put the url of the blog in our system.

And simply like that, you will see almost a 4x increase in your conversion rate for guest posts as well as link insertions, and as a result rank to the number 1 spot for your desired keyword on Google in no time.

If you’re running an agency, this is a fantastic opportunity to sell this as a service and enjoy fat margins due to the incredible amount of automation you’ll be getting. Infact checkout how this agency increased their reply rates by 200% for backlinking

So lets dive into how you do this in a few clicks.

1. Lead Generation

You need to find a list of blogs you want to target. In this case, I want to ask these blogs to insert my own link into the webpage, you can do whatever you want, this can be link replacement, asking for a guest post - all we’re doing is creating a personalised intro using a blog page at scale - without ever visiting that page. These aren’t the blog home pages but the actual blog itself.

I use AHREFS to do this. I want to find all the blogs talking about web analytics. I go to the keyword explorer option in AHREFs and type in “Web Analytics”

The search result then shows me all the blogs that are currently talking about web analytics, and there’s a lot of them. Once exported i’ll then upload them into SmartWriter’s backlink personalisation option.

2. Creating the personalisation and the pitch

Upload the CSV you’ve just downloaded into SmartWriter and map the column that has the blog  URL.

We offer three options where we will generate the “pitch” or “offer” for you as well, so you don’t need to do that.

• Asking to add a link from our blog to their page
• Replacing a competitors link
• Asking for a guest post

For this example, we’re not going to go with the pitch option and instead just generate the personalised intro.

After the URL column is selected click generate and let the magic happen.

3. Download the results

We generate 2 outputs just to give you the freedom to explore different AI pockets, and in this case you can see it nailed the intro. It genuinely looks like we’ve spent time going through this listicle and offered our personalised thoughts.

When you export the output, our decision engine will automatically select the best of the two outputs so you don’t need to worry about going through each option if you don’t want to, everything is automated for you.

After you’re done with that, click on the export button and upload the data directly into your CRM (or you can push it directly, whatever you prefer).

In your CRM you need to map the column of personalisation (either personalisation_1 or personalisation_2) or SELECTED_ICEBREAKER (if you manually selected your preferred option) as a custom variable - I usually just go with “icebreaker”.

This example, i’m using lemlist as my email sender and this is what it looks like

And voila, that’s all you have to do and you’ll be seeing your ranking scale.

As a parting thought, I wanted to share this image with you for an outreach we did, a real out. This got us a link from a website that would have normally charged >$3,000-$4,000 to get a link added, but we got that for…free - and you can too.