In a friendly way, I run a tumblr called “Black Cat SEO”; lots of animated gifs and funs. I got the idea from runningastartup tumblr although I believe “This SEO Life” was the first SEO related one I found. I completely recommend them, keep it up!

I thought leaving my real email on Black Cat SEO was a good idea, knowing that afterwards was time for spam which I was ready for. What life didn’t prepare me for was the following outreach email:

Hello

I was just going through few blogs yesterday and came across your site <http://black-cat-seo.tumblr.com> too. I really liked the way you have presented your blog. We are a blog content distribution company from last 10 years and Like to contribute content to your blog. We understand and ensure that

Content will be related to your blog theme
Unique contents written by experts blogger in our company, NO Spinning or crappy blog posts.
Blog posts will be published on your blog only It will not be distributed anywhere to avoid duplicate contents

In return We just need one link to our customer website

We will like to have long term relationship with you as free content provider for your blog. I think it will be mutually benefited to both of us

Please let me know if this sounds good to you, so that we work further on this. I shall be waiting for your response.

With Warm Regards,

I was feeling amused or flattered or both.  How was my cheap, gif, poor content, textless, mundane site so appreciated?  I’m aware that probably there is no one behind that email other than a scraping machine. Nevertheless it put me in a new position. The receiver.

For a long time during my internships, outreach emailing was the everyday. Starting from a really low response rate and bit by bit increasing them along with the learning curve. But how were my receivers feeling? Probably the same. Amused, funny, fake, -canned precooked mail-, spam.

I was reckless and we all know what happens after those emails…

Here is where I want to stick up for those emails or the people behind them. I’m not a genius and I started at that point too – sending crappy template emails with almost no chance of response.

And doing what we all do, we lie, we have the imagination of a dead toad. We tell them how beautiful the world is since they started writing, how much we agree on their topics, how amazing their colour theme power space combination on their blog is, how my sense of what user experience is has changed after the 10 seconds it took me to find their email address. Always keep this in mind:

Most people are only aware of one way to solve problems. Sending an outreach email must be taken as a new problem every single time. Building trust and relationships must only be done with understanding and that takes time. We don’t need to find a certain amount of things to catch up the attention.

Unique selling proposition (USP)

Having an advertising background helps. Who helps even more is  Rosser Reeves and his wisdom on USP. Basically what he states is giving a unique proposition to the customer which will convince him to switch brands or, in this case, at least answer our mail. Finding this unique item could be a pivot point. Finding that engagement trigger is what stands out from a cheap outreach email.

Think on those specific parts of content, find a common point to align things together. Have sex with words to reach brains. We all have good mums, grandmas, our aunts to tell us how shiny are all the things we touch.

This time I’ve been inspired from two posts, first one from Chris Dyson, You Can get Links from Cold Outreach, and recently from Se▲n, with his pro tip 1. Worth reading – good posts. Do it, there you will find the true path and first steps on writing outstanding outreach emails.

And just for the record, I offered to place the link they were asking for even without post. They never answered. :(

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