Links are one of the most important factors used by search engines.
If you want your website's pages to be found in search, you will need links.
Search engines use good links to identify the best content to show for specific search queries.
Depending on your goals and needs, there are tons of link building strategies you can try. You can increase referral traffic and gain more visibility with some strategies.
At Hunter, we're constantly improving our link profile and getting more visibility for our brand. We've tested a lot of link-building strategies, and one that showed us the best results was link building via "best" listicles.
In less than three months, we got 96 new links, 33 new product listings, and 17 new listings.
How did we do it? I'll show you how we implemented this strategy step-by-step if you read this guide.
First things first, what areicles?
A "listicle" is an article with some kind of extra detail below each item. It's easy to skim to find important information in this format.
Each paragraph/chapter has a similar format, making it easy to compare many items quickly, and each title tells you what to expect.
This is an excellent example of a listicle created by HubSpot.
This is a review of the best techniques and tools for prospecting, which have a similar structure and approach to each product.
Why do you need to be featured in listicles?
Listicles can be used to compare products and services.
You're new to sales prospecting. You don't know much about the popular tools on the market, and you need to find the best one for your team. To get some information about the topic you don't know much about, you can type in something like "best prospecting tools" or "best sales prospecting tools review."
You click on a similar search result page which contains a lot of listicles.
Hunter's key product is related to sales prospecting, and we wanted to be present in many listicles that generate high organic traffic.
You can get that by appearing in those listicles.
Imagine someone searching for the best product or service for your brand. You are mentioned in all the top positions in the listicles below, even though you appear number one on the first independent listicle.
If you appear in those listicles in 85% of cases, you'll get one or a couple of new links to your website.
There are cases when you can be featured in the listicle of "10 Best Tools/Products for XYZ" as the #10 item that gets minimum visibility. Your goal may be to improve your position in that listicle.
Let's start with the exact steps and strategies that will help you get a lot of mentions in the listicles.
The first step is to collect prospects for outreach.
The first thing to do would be to find prospects that are relevant to the mention in the listicle.
There are two ways to do it.
You can use a manual approach to search for your product or service.
For example, "best + [your product category]" or "top tools for your product category"
The most popular way to find listicles would be:
Best.
There is a list.
There are tools.
Top.
There is software.
Review.
It's free.
The Toolkit.
Services.
You can combine these with your product or service category.
At Hunter, we created a spreadsheet that listed everything relevant to our product terms and a list of modifiers that can be used with those terms. The most successful combinations are "best tools for email lookup" or "best free software to verify email".
The name of the study is Hunter's Case Study.
If you prefer, you could use an automated approach, which will allow you to find more prospects in less time.
You need an Ahrefs account. If you don't have a subscription, there is a $7/week trial that will allow you to find all of the prospects you need.
In Ahrefs, you can enter yourKeywords and export the results in a csv file.
You can repeat it for all of the ideas you generate. You should combine all of the CSVs you collected with Ahrefs.
In the merged CSV, make sure to remove duplicate items. There is a quick guide on how to remove them.
It's time to do some manual work, which is a bit time consuming but rewarding in the end.
You can open each URL. Those that are not listicles should be removed. Each email should have a sequence tag. You will use it to personalize outreach.
We used four key tags.
Our product is not mentioned in the listicle.
The product's position is below the top of the list.
Hunter mentioned #1 without a link, just ask to add a backlink.
Hunter didn't need to contact this website to mention #1.
Adding a sequence tag for each relevant listicle is one thing, but you should also add a sentence of personalization to your spreadsheet to use in your automated outreach sequence.
This is what it looked like in a spreadsheet.
You should export the traffic and authority of the URLs you collected. It helps to set your team's priorities better. The pages with the highest traffic and authority should be your focus.
It's time to find decision-makers in those companies once you complete this step.
The highest response rate for the listicle outreach was from the content managers and the editors of the blogs. It could be business owners in small companies.
You can find the full name of the decision-maker from the company's profile on LinkedIn.
Once you know the full name of your prospect, enter it in Email Finder. You'll get a verified email address in seconds. You can find 25 emails for free with Email Finder.
Author Finder can be used to find the email addresses of the authors. If you install a free extension, you can make the email lookup process simpler.
Click on the extension icon to open the listicle URL. You will get the email address of the author.
The prospect's name, company, and email address can be added to your spreadsheet. You will use it later to personalize outreach.
If you find emails with other providers, verify them. It can hurt your deliverability rates if you use unverifiedemails.
Prepare email copy.
It's time to prepare an email copy.
It's important to segment your outreach sequence, personalize your emails, and provide maximum value to your prospects.
Three sequence were created for our outreach.
Those who did not mention our product.
Those mentioned our product but not other products.
For those who didn't link back to us.
The email we sent for those listicles mentioned other products from our niche, but didn't mention us.
TheHunters Case Study is a piece of work that was published on Nov 24th, 2016 and will be published on May 16th, 2016
There are a few critical things to include in your email copy.
No one will ever reply to you if you don't open your email first. Creating the perfect subject line is the first thing to do when working on a cold email campaign. It should be short and easy to remember so your reader doesn't get lost. Make them curious and interested.
The opening line is the most important sentence in your email. The next step would be to make prospects read your message after you wrote a successful subject line. Chances are you'll never get a response from your prospect if you start with something blurry, dull, and generic. It's important to add a personalized icebreaker at this point. This is the reason we added this line about each article.
Personalize at scale with custom attributes. Cold outreach automation tools can be used here. You can create a spreadsheet with all your data and add custom attributes to email copy. You don't need to do a lot of manual work because your emails will be personalized on a high level.
Provide value in return. Offer them the chance to participate in your program or help with the promotion. Think of anything that brings them value.
It's important to end your email with a CTA. There is no need to wait for an answer when you ask an open-ended question. It should be clear and straightforward.
Set up an outreach campaign.
Cold outreach can be time consuming, but if you find the right approach to automate it, you won't need to spend a lot of time on your campaigns.
We knew what we were going to do for the listicle outreach campaign.
We would need to send personalized emails to our prospects.
We would need to send follow-ups as the response rate increases.
You don't want to write every single email from scratch when you have hundreds or even thousands of prospects to reach.
It can be hard to remember when you need to follow up with each prospect. It may sound like a nightmare if you have more than one follow-up for each.
This is where you need to use intelligent automation.
Campaigns is a free tool that helps to automate cold emailing from your Gmail account.
We used custom attributes to automate personalization. You have to collect all the data before the outreach. You just import it from your spreadsheet and send it in a single click.
The final email looked personal and relevant to the prospect.
The following is a picture of the PM.
The sequence used personalization from the spreadsheet and we added two automated follow-ups. The rule was to send the first follow-up in three days and the second in six days.
The name of the case is Hunter's Case Study.
It's important to schedule cold follow-ups.
Our rule is to not schedule too many follow-ups. It's best to limit it to three follow-ups for your cold email campaigns. If you send too many follow-ups to someone who's never heard of you, you may look like an annoying person and damage your brand reputation.
The same thread is used for all emails. In this case, you can use follow-ups to continue telling the story.
When you automate outreach, you should keep in mind the weekend and public holidays.
In negotiations, be proactive.
When you hit "send," your cold outreach campaign continues. How successful your campaign will be depends on your negotiation skills and proactivity.
The answer you receive to the listicle outreach campaign looks like this:
The name of the case is Hunter's Case Study.
Most of the prospects will try to get more benefits for you in exchange for a link, product mention, or position upgrade, because we don't live in a perfect world. Be prepared to negotiate!
We got the most mentions after getting answers from our prospects.
It doesn't mean that you have to stay up all night. As soon as you see the email, answer it.
If you contacted a DR 90 website and the traffic to the desired listicle is 1K sessions, be flexible in negotiations. You don't want to lose a big fish.
Do something for them. If you give more value in return, you will get more chances of being featured. Give free consultation on something you're good at if you offer to share content after the update.
Make sure to schedule follow-ups for people who showed interest. Sometimes people are busy at the time you send an email or forget about the conversation. It's okay. Follow up with your conversation gently. You can use Gmail to snooze conversations and get a reminder to follow up on a specific date.
Track all negotiations with a spreadsheet. If you have too many prospects, use aCRM.
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Link building via "best" listicles is an effective strategy that can help to get tons of mentions and links for your business if you do it right.
Make sure you spend enough time researching and gathering information on your potential prospects.
Prepare email sequences that are unique and relevant to each segment, and add information that is relevant to your prospects.
Automate routine work by using tools for cold outreach, and at the same time, spend as much time as needed on negotiations.
It is hoped that you will begin to see powerful results from your listicle outreach very soon.
The original story was published on Dec 7, 2021.
