I’m sitting on an air mattress in my new unfurnished brooklyn apartment listening to the sounds of the city out of the window after a long day of client meetings. At one point I was thinking “Man I wish I bought that ugly sofa from ikea so I’d have something to sit on” and next thing I knew I was considering the tao of outreach link building.

I know, I know. Outreach link building is hard. It takes time. You send 1000 emails and end up with seven links but I believe that’s largely because most search marketers approach link building the wrong way. In fact I’m going to declare right now that link building should be the easiest and most fun part of seo.

Talk to people like people throw out your form letters

There is often a lot of talk about who to target and how to find them but there isn’t much about how you get their attention, sustain it, close the Business Owner Phone Numbers List deal and maintain the relationship. With the exception of what justin spoke about in his link building webinar, most recommendations revolve around building form letters and tailoring them a little more depending on the target.

The following are 5 principles that I have identified and streamlined to improve my link building success rate from about 20% to around 80%

In my experience, this is the least effective method to engage in outreach link building. The following are five principles that I have identified and streamlined to improve my link building success rate from about 20% to around 80%.

Talk to people like people

Search marketers tend to think of link building as obtaining a link from a website. Truly link building is speaking to a person and convincing them to EF Leads take a real world action that is beneficial to you. Link building is cast as a very impersonal process where we use the various methods to identify link targets, write a form letter and fire away expecting that the return on these outreach emails will be so low that it doesn’t make sense to spend time on them.