Backlink Outreach: How We Get 15 Links Per Week [+Templates]

Backlink outreach is usually perceived as time-consuming and even tedious.

But it doesn’t have to be.

In this article, we will share the exact strategies, tips, and templates we use to generate 15 backlinks each week, with only one person actively doing outreach.

Let’s get into it!

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Gain access to the 3-step strategy we use to earn over 86 high-quality backlinks each month.

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Backlink Outreach Challenges

Before we dive into our step-by-step backlink outreach process, let’s take a closer look at the most common reasons businesses ditch link building as an SEO strategy (even though it’s benefits can not be denied).

Time-Intensive

First things first, preparing a backlink outreach campaign can take a while – especially if you don’t already have an established process.

Depending on your specific set of tools, it can take several hours just to find and filter prospective link building opportunities.

Then, there is the case of finding contact email addresses.

Most link builders use automated contact finders, but the searches aren’t instant either – depending on the size of your campaign, it can take several hours for the search automation to complete.

And finally, personalizing emails is a practice you can’t skip unless you want to end up in spam.

While personalizing a link building outreach email is much easier than a sales pitch, if you have several hundred messages to send, those couple of minutes spent on each one start to really stack up.

So, realistically, running a link building outreach campaign of a decent size (~150 prospects) from start to finish can take most of your work day, if not the entire thing.

Oh, and how could we forget – you also need to constantly check your emails and talk with your link building partners, which can be distracting from other tasks, and take a moment in and of itself; especially on a Monday.

Can Be Hard to Scale

Link outreach works best at scale.

The average reply rate for a link building email is ~10% (based on over 37000 link pitches we’ve sent over the past 3 years).

Half of these replies will be negative.

So, with a success rate of about 5%, it takes us over 300 emails to get to the 15 link/week mark.

In our niche (SEO/email marketing), it’s relatively easy to consistently keep finding new prospects to reach out to.

However, this may not be the case in a different niche – for example, coworking management software or any other micro-niche segment..

There simply isn’t enough relevant content around to run large-scale blogger outreach campaigns for smaller niches, which can make building backlinks not nearly as effective.

Takes Months to Take Effect

Finally, the SEO benefits of backlink building are not immediate.

The links need to be indexed by Google first.

They need to be clicked on by actual people second.

And you need a lot of links to make a real difference.

You can expect to see tangible increases in traffic and organic visibility after 3-4 months of consistent link building.

We started consistently building backlinks in 2021:

Which is also when our traffic started growing, until peaking in 2022:

Note: Semrush provides an estimate for any website’s traffic, so the numbers shown here are lower than they really were.

“That’s a long time and a lot of effort!” – you say.

It is, but we’re here to make it simpler.

Step 1 – Create Your Campaign

Let’s start with creating our campaigns. .

We use a combination of three link building strategies: competitor backlinks, the anchor text link building strategy, and, of course, guest posting.

However, we don’t do any separate prospecting for guest posting opportunities.

More on that later.

For each step of the process, we will be using our own tool, Respona – it was built specifically for backlink outreach.

Competitor Backlinks

The competitor backlinks outreach strategy is rather straightforward.

You choose a piece of content that you want to build links to, than take competing pieces of content, extract their backlinks, and reach out to the people linking to them.

We can use Respona’s built-in skyscraper technique campaign template to speed up the process.

To use it, you just need to fill out five fields:

1. Content URL
2. Target keyword
3. Competitor URLs
4. Content description
5. Incentive

Doing so will preconfigure the prospect search, and create your email template along the way.

Click “Use this template”, and it’s pretty much good to go.

Anchor Text Strategy

The point of the anchor text strategy is to find non-competing articles that mention our target keyword somewhere in the text, and reach out to them to place our link on that anchor text.

We can create another campaign using the “link insertion” campaign template, or add more opportunities to our already existing campaign.

Let’s use the template to kill two birds with one stone. Meaning, build or email sequence and pre-load the search at the same time.

Similar to the skyscraper technique strategy, there are only a few fields to fill out.

However, in the second field (your target keywords) field, you have an additional option to use Respona’s AI keyword suggestions to come up with 20 additional subtopics and niche areas related to content promotion.

Now, to the next step.

Step 2 – Preparing Your Sequence

An outreach link building email sequence should consist of the initial pitch and 1-2 follow-ups.

Arguably, the most important part of a link building pitch is your value proposition.

Google says natural links occur for free, because the linking person liked the content, but in reality, people need an extra incentive to actually go ahead and grant you the SEO real estate that is your target anchor text on their page.

Don’t tell Google we told you this, but the most common way to get someone to link to you is to link to them indirectly.

Yes, it qualifies as a “link scheme” by their Webmaster Guidelines.

But, in reality, it’s hard for Google to track these indirect exchanges, so it’s still an everyday practice in 2024.

All campaign templates in Respoina come with pre-built email sequences.

However, we recommend taking a moment to refine them or create your own.

When working on your template, we highly recommend checking it for spam words using our reply chance estimator:

It checks your email length, question, link, and number count, and, of course, highlights spam words and provides recommendations based on data gathered from over a million emails sent through our platform.

Next up, we suggest adding an unsubscribe link to give your prospects a seamless way to opt out from further communications in case they are not interested.

Last but not least, Respona arms you with an arsenal of variables, including AI email writer fields that will generate unique personalizations based on your prospects’ content.

The following templates are proven formats that have helped us earn 15 weekly backlinks over the course of the past two years.

Feel free to take inspiration from them for your own outreach.

Competitor Backlinks Template

Anchor Text Strategy Template

Follow-Up

As for the follow-up, there’s no need to re-invent the wheel, but it’s important to add a little sense of urgency (without pushing it).

If your value proposition in the initial pitch in an indirect link back from a guest post, a valuable backlinik outreach strategy is to say something along the lines of:

It’s also important to not be pushy.

In our experience a single follow-up is enough.

More than that, and you start coming across as spammy.

Also, make sure to space out your messages and give your prospects at least 3-5 days between them.

Step 3 – Finding Opportunities & Contacts

Respona has its own search engine for finding blog posts and extracting backlinks.

It also has an email finding and verifying algorithm that automates link building prospecting almost entirely.

The algorithm for finding link insertion opportunities uses Google search. It automatically pulls the target keywords you entered at the first template screen and applies advanced search operators like inurl: and intext: to find specific blog posts that mention your keywords in the content.

As for the competitor backlinks search automation, it’s a little bit more straightforward – Respona takes the URLs of your competitors that you entered on the first page, and pulls their backlink profile.

By default, Respona is integrated with Moz, so that’s where the backlink data is coming from.

However, if you have an account with Ahrefs or Semrush, you can connect it to Respona and use one of these tools as a search source instead.

Click “Continue” and add some additional SEO filters (like Domain Authority/Domain Rating to narrow down the search to only articles that are viable for you to collaborate with.

When done, click “Continue” once again to get into the contact finder settings.

Once again, becase we used a campaign template, all of these settings are already pre-configured for us.

Respona is already pre-set to find relevant decision-makers for link building, such as:

• Content marketing managers
• SEO managers
• Partnerships managers
• Digital marketing managers

In case there are no fitting emails found at the company, there are also two advanced options we can enable: generic emails (like [email protected]), and catch-all emails.

Let’s enable generic emails, and skip catch-all emails off for deliverability purposes.

In the next window, let’s provide our AI personalizations with some guidelines to sound more like us.

You can use examples of your previous personalizations to train it, and specify the tone and style you expect from it.

Last but not least, let’s also make our campaign recurring – Respona will automatically search for fresh opportunities (and personalize emails) for us every couple of weeks.

All we’ll need to do is log in and launch the new opportunities.

When ready, click “Run” automation to kickstart the search for relevant websites, their contact information, and personalize your pitches – all at the same time.

Results will start popping up on the screen as soon as they’re found.

After it’s done, you can move on to the last step.

Step 4 – Personalization

Every webmaster received low-quality link building pitches on a daily basis.

Which is why backlink outreach is often viewed as spam.

Adding a little bit of personality to your pitches (in addition to providing value to your prospect instead of just asking for something) is a good way to start off the relationship with your prospect on the right foot.

But, at the same time, it’s important not to overdo it (like mention your prospect’s dog that you saw on their social media) – it’s just a link building pitch, after all.

A solid strategy for this is to mention something your prospect has talked about in their article.

Just don’t be this guy:

Yes, of course, I mentioned “email deliverability”. The post is literally called “Email Deliverability Checklist”.

And they’re suggesting us to link to their own guide on email deliverability… From our checklist.

At least glance over your prospect’s content.

Or, use Respona’s AI-powered personalizations to do the heavy lifting for you.

They are fully customizable, and can “read” your prospects’ content to make very specific personalizations..

After all pitches are personalized, all that’s left is to run the final pre-launch checks to make sure all variables are filled out correctly, there are no placeholders in your pitches, and you’re not trying to reach out to any recent contacts or ones that are in your unsubscribe list.

Step 5 – Establishing Partnerships

Now, all that’s left to do is to wait for replies and manage your relationships.

However, to maximize your results, it’s important to evolve those one-time collaborations into longer-lasting partnerships.

For example, you can create a tracking Google sheet and send your new link opportunities to your partners regularly – and they will do the same for you in return.

This is a great way to earn more links for less effort – and should not be underestimated.

Content Gap Guest Post Pitch

Another step of your link building collaboration is to pitch a guest post to your prospect.

Even if they don’t have a “Write for Us” page, chances are they may still accept your guest post.

But your pitch shouldn’t be a mundane “Can I write for you?” email.

Once again, you need to slide in some value for your prospect. After all, why should they publish an article by someone they barely know?

Enter the content gap pitch.

If you use tools like Semrush or Ahrefs, you can run your prospect’s domain through it’s Keyword Gap function.

Find several keywords that they are not ranking for, but their competitors are, and come up with a couple of topics to help them cover the content gap.

This is a great opportunity to show that you are, in fact, not just another write-for-hire, but in fact,  know why content is written, and how.

Link building cheat sheet

Gain access to the 3-step strategy we use to earn over 86 high-quality backlinks each month.

Download for free

Now Over to You

So, this is our exact process on how to get 15 weekly backlinks, with only a single cold email outreach specialist.

As a tool made specifically to build backlinks, Respona greatly cuts down the time required to manage your backlink outreach.

In fact, it can cut down up to 90% of your time spent.

Feel free to start your 14-day free trial today to see it in action.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

What is backlink outreach?

Backlink outreach is the process of contacting website owners, bloggers, and influencers to request or earn high-quality inbound links to your website.

These backlinks help improve your website’s authority, visibility, and search engine ranking.

Why is backlink outreach important for SEO?

Backlink outreach is essential for SEO because high-quality backlinks are a key ranking factor for search engines like Google.

When authoritative websites link to your content, it signals to search engines that your website is filled with quality content, ultimately getting you higher rankings.

How do I find potential backlink opportunities?

To find high quality backlink opportunities, start by researching your competitors’ backlinks, industry-specific resource page lists, and guest posting opportunities.

Additionally, use tools like Ahrefs, Moz, SEMrush, or Respona to identify websites that are likely to link to your content.

What is the best way to approach someone for a backlink?

When approaching someone for a backlink, start by establishing a relationship with the website owner or influencer through social media or email.

Offer valuable content that their audience would find helpful and explain why it would benefit them to link to your content.

Be polite, professional, personalize your outreach message to increase your chances of getting a positive response, and include a strong incentive for them to link to you.

How can I track the success of my backlink outreach efforts?

To track the success of your backlink outreach efforts, use backlink analysis tools like Ahrefs, Moz, or SEMrush to monitor your website’s backlink profile. Google Analytics is rather limited in terms of link tracking.

Keep an eye on new and lost backlinks, as well as the overall growth in the number of high-quality backlinks.

Additionally, track improvements in your website’s search engine ranking and organic traffic, as these are key indicators of successful backlink outreach.