Thread by @patientpublish

Here’s a new backlink 🔗 outreach strategy I’m trying that’s likely to have an extremely high failure rate.

BUT, even if 1 of the 200 emails I send converts, it will be worth it.

The campaign is targeted at .edu’s and it’s inspired by @BrianEDean.

🧵👇#SEO #blog

When you’re looking for a specific data point, and you discover it in the SERPs, what’s more likely?

1️⃣ You spend time to reproduce that same data
2️⃣ You link to the article

…#2 for most.

That’s why generating original, high quality research can serve as great link-bait. 🎣

Producing an article with original research that was highly relevant to my niche was step #1 of this process. 🔬

This strategy targets colleges and universities, so naturally this directly influenced my link-bait topic selection.

I dug through student resource pages for inspiration, looking for topics most schools covered with at least one dedicated page.

Once I had my overarching topic identified, I spent some time thinking about specific data sets that students would genuinely find helpful. 🤝

The article I set off to write required 12 hours of data collection sessions and took about a week to complete (all sessions had to be conducted after my day job wrapped up).

Once the post was published, it was time to start the outreach. 📣

Let’s say the topic area I selected was “Adobe Creative Cloud” (it wasn’t).

I used the following Google search command to find all the .edu pages covering this topic:

🟢 site:.edu “Adobe Creative Cloud”

I then started going through 1 by 1 to find the contact info of the ‘content owners’ of each page.

In most cases this was the IT help desk team. In some cases, it was the digital content team, etc.

I put together a brief, but descriptive email template that I further customized for every school. 📚

The emails started by complimenting their current resource page (with a link to it) and detailed my research (with a link to it) and why their students would find it helpful.

I closed each email noting where a link to my data may be best placed on their current page.

I’ve been sending these emails in batches of about 20-30, and what’s great is I can see in my real-time GA the post being viewed across the country often within an hour of being sent. 👀

So far, I’m getting 1-2 responses back for every 20 emails sent…

…no positive hits yet but I’m optimistic one will bite.

Here’s a recent response I received from U Pitt. An 88 DR backlink woulda been nice… 😬

That’s it!

Nothing overly complicated, but certainly time consuming.

Once I’ve completed the full outreach process I’ll plan to report back my final response/conversion rates. 🫡