Lammo.net: Affiliate Marketing Blog

How many times have you received one of those auto-generated link request emails? If you’re anything like me you’ll receive so many you’ve lost count and you usually delete them before bothering to read them. Sound familiar?

Anyone with a website can’t fail to be bombarded with stacks of emails from random offshore companies offering and asking for equally random and off-topic links to their site. If you bother to click through to their site, you’ll usually see that it is fortunate not to have been blacklisted by every search engine out there. Even for credible sites, you’re often faced with some automated junk email that makes it clear that the author has never looked at your site, has no idea who you are and has sent exactly the same email to one thousand other people. Not exactly designed to make you feel wanted.

Unfortunately this barrage of emails has made it hard for anyone to successfully send link requests via email. Email is the most economical and straightforward way of pro-actively building links for your site, so there are few alternatives. With the right approach, it is possible to make these emails work for you, you just need to look at it from the perspective of the person reading the email (and you know how it feels, so that should be easy) and follow some simple guidelines:

Get personal
Do your friends greet you with “Hi Webmaster”? When you send a link request email to someone, you’re asking them to do something for you. If you want something from someone, the best way to get them to give it to you is to be nice and make them like you (the best sales people are always the friendly ones, after all). Addressing the person with their real name is a great start and goes a long way to getting them on board right from the word go. At the very least, it may mean they start to read the email, rather than deleting by default. Ensure that the email talks about their specific website, mentioning the site’s actual name and any specific topics that are relevant, rather than generalising with terms like “your site” and “your topic area”.

Flattery will get you everywhere
The best way to persuade someone is to flatter them. Don’t focus on your site. Make sure they have the information they need, but use the email to talk about their website. This also means getting personal - by reading through their website and understanding what they’re about, you can make genuine and relevant comments about their website, explaining why you would like to have a link on their site.

Be relevant
Focus your emails on people whose sites are actually relevant to yours. Give reasons why they should link to your site. Why is it relevant? Which pages on your site are relevant to the content on their site? Where do you fit into THEIR grand scheme of things.

Make it a positive
In the process of explaining how relevant your site is to theirs, it’s easy to see how it could be of benefit to them to add a link to your site. You might be filling a gap on their site, offering their visitors a service which they or their existing link partners are unable to provide. The link may just give their visitors more options and a wider view on the field you represent. By portraying the link to your site as a benefit to their site, you are much more likely to get them to agree with you.

Be credible
Would you give a link to someone when you received an email from an offshore link building firm you’ve never heard of? How much would you trust them? Exactly.

Personal emails, both in terms of to whom they are addressed and from whom they are sent are crucial to gaining trust and getting your way. Make sure your email comes from your personal email — or at the very least your company’s email address. If possible, add contact details at the bottom of the email so your email recipient can call you if he or she wants, or at least knows they could if they wanted to. Don’t worry, most of them probably won’t (although you are bound to get a few “why don’t you flog my stuff” calls), but it’s nice knowing that a real person exists behind the request email.

Be well-behaved
Intrinsic to credibility is behaving well in terms of responses to your emails. Ensure that all negative responses are dealt with promptly and professionally. Unsubscribe requests should be complied with swiftly. If all of this feels as though it is going to be time consuming, you’re right - it is! There are however specialist firms who can actually achieve all of the above for you, including sending via your own mail systems if you feel you haven’t got the time and resource to handle it.

Frustrated with the lack of response to your link-building campaign emails? The golden rule is:
“Email to others as you would have emailed to yourself.”

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