Use a Contact Management System for Link Requests
A full-blown inbound link campaign involves contacting webmasters and executives at several hundred (or several thousand) websites. Since many of your initial overtures will be met with silence, you will need to reach out to most of your contacts on multiple occasions, and sometimes the answer will be, "I'll get back to you."For high-value link prospects, it will be worthwhile to craft and distribute a series of custom link-request emails that reflect an understanding of their website and audience, followed-up by a couple of phone call attempts.
For medium-value link prospects, it will be worthwhile to create and distribute custom emails, while low-value link prospects will only warrant distribution of form letter emails.
To keep track of it all, you'll need a contact management system that allows you to easily:
- generate partly populated emails that can be personalized with fields (e.g., first name) from a database
- select from a dropdown list of pipeline categories (e.g., "2nd email sent, still no response" or "waiting for webmaster to upload link")
- set reminder alerts (e.g., call back on Friday at 10:00 a.m. EST)
- add notes (e.g., "daughter's name is Stacy" or "enjoys ping pong")
- categorize and sort link prospects based on their importance
If you already have access to a general contact management system, use that one. If not, investigate the contact management software developed for webmasters who participate in reciprocal link exchanges. Please note: I do not recommend large-scale reciprocal link exchanging; however, the contact management software developed for that purpose has many helpful features. For example, ARELIS (http://axandra-link-popularity-tool.com) can automatically identify good link targets based on who links to your allies or opponents, and can then scour their webpages to automatically load the contact information listed on their websites.
Note: Many organizations avoid publishing personal email addresses on their websites, preferring instead to list general mailboxes, such as info@xyz.org or webmaster@xyz.org or questions@xyz.org. Resist the temptation to send your link requests to general mailboxes, which are usually staffed by people who are authorized to say "no," but not "yes," to your link request.
Instead, to find the direct email addresses of executives with the power to say "yes" to your link request, call the prospect organizations or manually inspect their websites. Good places to look for contact information include "management team" and "press release" webpages.
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