The profession of an “online marketer” requires us to deal with lots of outreach.

We reach out to let people know about our content, ask for a backlink or simply connect with someone.

But there’s one more group of people who do lots of “outreach”.

SPAMmers.

So where’s the red line? And who do you want to be in the first place?

Trivia: Outreach or Spam?

Here’s an email I got the other day.

What would you call it – Outreach or SPAM?

Please leave your vote before you read any further.

It would be fun to see if there are two opinions to it.

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As for me, I deleted it without even reading. It’s not that hard to notice a “template”:

1. Hey. You’re cool. I read your blog.
2. I saw this post: http://post1
3. It links to this post: http://post2
4. I have a similar post: http://post3
5. Please link to it

Yeah, sure… *Delete*

“Outreach” is not “Broadcasting”

You just published a new article on your blog and now you want to send a mass email to 100+ influencers, with an excuse: “I saw you tweeted a similar post”.

I’m sorry to say that, but your content is not welcome in their inbox.

Otherwise they would probably sign up to your email list beforehand.

And besides, all these 100+ influential people who you want to reach out to cannot be treated the same way.

Sending the same email template to Gael Breton and Gary Vaynerchuck is probably the dumbest thing you could do.

I like to split my “outreach list” into three groups:

#1 Big Fish

People with an enormous audience and outstanding achievements (think Gary Vaynerchuck).

These people are super busy most of their time, and many of them are using Virtual Assistants to protect themselves from your outreach emails.

So you have to be really creative if you want to reach them.

#2 Small Fish

These are the people who didn’t reach the “guru” level yet, but have quite a decent audience size anyways (think Gael Breton).

They might use VA’s as well, but still there’s a very good chance that they will read your outreach email personally (not necessarily reply to it though).

#3 Newbies

The people who are only starting to get some traction.

Their audience size is quite small and they don’t have too much on their plate at the moment, so they will most likely reply to your outreach email even if it’s 100% canned.

Get on the radar of a Big Fish and you’ll get overwhelmed with the amount of traffic/sales that he will send your way.

But that’s close to impossible.

Get on the radar of a Newbie and you’ll get 50 new visitors at best.

If that’s your goal – keep doing what you’re doing. Canned emails work quite well.

But this article is about reaching out to the Small Fish – who are pretty much the sweet spot of your outreach list.

#1: Stop using generic subject lines

Let’s go back to the subject of the email example above.

“Hi Tim, Compliment on one of your posts”.

Immediately a little red flag raises in my head, because people rarely reach out with the sole goal of giving you a compliment.

My favourite approach to writing a subject line is to be genuine and spark a little bit of intrigue.

Whenever I reach out to people I don’t know, I never make my subject 100% obvious.

Example:

Email Subject: SEO audit at Ahrefs blog

You can tell that this subject has something to do with doing an “SEO audit” and “Ahrefs blog”.

But what exactly?

• Is this a request to have you do an SEO audit for us?
• Maybe your website was audited on Ahrefs blog?
• Maybe we just need a quote for an expert roundup?

You’ll never know that until you open the email.

#2 Avoid raw URLs in your emails

With automated outreach you have no choice but use a template like this:

“I recently came across {blog post title} that you/your company wrote/shared/posted on {social media platform}.”

or this:

“I was checking out some of the articles on your site and noticed your post on {topic}: {URL}”

Whenever I see a raw URL I realise that the email was generated by some kind of outreach software that can pull my name and my post URL from a simple Excel spreadsheet.

You didn’t spend any of your time to personalize your email to me, so there’s no way I’m going to read it.

And besides, why are you guys putting these raw URLs into your outreach emails?

Why don’t you just write something like:

“Just found the article you wrote last week on doing a 5-minute SEO audit.”

That’s it!

I don’t need the URL to recall the article that I wrote last week. And reaching out to me about something I wrote a couple months ago most likely doesn’t really make sense.

#3 Make sure that the value goes first

So you just published a new post on your blog.

Great! Why should I care about it?

The fact that I wrote a similar article a year ago or tweeted a similar article two weeks ago is not the kind of reasoning I’m looking for.

In fact it’s the opposite – I’m not interested in reading something similar to what I’ve already read.

If you can’t persuade me that there’s anything new for me in your article – there’s no point reaching out.

How?

Read my post from start to finish and see if you have something to add to it. If you really do – reach out and tell me about it.

Example:

We recently published a cool article titled “How To SEO Audit Your Website In 15 Minutes Or Less”.

After checking some other articles on the same topic I quickly spotted a little thing that is unique about ours.

We mention a great tool called Panguin that can help you easily identify Google penalties.

So this is how I would reach out to get some attention:

“I wonder if you’ve heard about the Panguin tool that helps audit websites for Google penalties, because I didn’t see you mention it in your article. Here’s an article at Ahrefs’ blog where we talk about using this tool.”

In other words, your outreach email should be entirely based on something that is unique about your article, which was not covered in the articles of people you reach out to.

They will appreciate it if you show them something cool that they haven’t seen before.

Finding the difference between your post and every other post on the same topic might seem like a ton of work, but that’s actually the essence of a worthwhile outreach strategy.

Either you have something unique in your post that no one else has mentioned before or your outreach doesn’t make sense and you should not be sending these emails in the first place.

And besides, don’t forget that “outreach is not broadcasting”.

A personalized outreach to 5 key people will bring you a lot more results than a mass email to a hundred random ones.

#4 Timing is everything

Just because someone wrote an article about something a few years ago, it doesn’t mean that he still cares about that topic today.

And there’s no way to make him update that old article and link to you.

But the opposite is true too.

If the article was published just yesterday, it’s author is an easy outreach target.

Here’s a thread at Inbound.org where you can clearly see how Brian Dean updated his newly published article with 22 more tools, just because people pinged him immediately after the article was published:

Guess what will happen if you reach out to Brian now and ask them to add your tool?

He won’t do it.

That’s because he has already moved on to something else and won’t get back to that article anytime soon.

PRO TIP: Use Content Explorer tool by Ahrefs to search for articles that were published in the last few months:

#5 Personalized emails are hard to ignore

Take time to dig a little bit on a person you’re reaching out to and your chances of getting a response from him will go through the roof.

I mean if you bothered to spend your time learning about me and you show that in your outreach email – I will feel like a total ass if I leave it without a response.

But don’t get me wrong. Things like “I’m a big fan of your blog” or “I’ve been reading your articles for a while” don’t work. They are way too cliche and clearly canned.

Check out this email outreach I once sent to Jimmy Daly from Vero.

Can you spot the line that proved that my email wasn’t generic?

It’s the very first one after greeting.

I knew that Jimmy was a fan of epic guides because he recently published an “epic post” followed by an “epic post breakdown”.

The result?

#6 NEVER ask for shares or links

This is something that is obvious for both parties.

Why else would you reach out? You want to get some kind of traction for your article.

However you have more chances of making this happen if you let the recipient decide what he wants to do next.

Never write something like “If you enjoyed my article I’d really like for you you to share it on your site” – they are way too cheesy.

Just give people something cool and they will automatically want to share it.

If you need to convince them to do it – it’s a sign you shouldn’t bother them at all.

#7 Persistence won’t save your generic outreach

Being persistent is a very good thing.

I saw so many examples when someone managed to get what he wanted just because he was persistent.

But persistence won’t save your generic outreach. Ever.

I will illustrate it with a series of screenshots from my inbox:

Please delete your outreach templates and start giving real value

There’s no magic formula or a quick fix for good outreach.

But there are plenty of bad templates.

I sincerely hope that after reading this article you’re going to reconsider your outreach strategies.

Don’t shoot yourself in the foot, be genuine and provide real value to the person you’re reaching out to.

And I would really appreciate it if you could send this article to a few friends, to prevent them from sending lame outreach templates and ruining their reputation!