Link Building Email Reply Rates

What % of Emails Sent Out Requesting a Link are Even Answered?

[MatthewHamilton]

I was told by one of my seniors at work that the reply rate to emails requesting a link to one of our sites was near zero but that it was nonetheless a worthwhile effort - any suggestions as to how one might improve chances from the "cold e-mail" approach... should a reciprocal relationship be mentioned upfront as a possibility or should one merely hope for the best and do thy best spam job in terms of sheer volume?

[topr8]

telephone them don't email

[ken_b]

Maybe it's how you word your request. Maybe it's what account you send the request from.

I just trashed another link request. They wanted a link to "example.com" but sent the email from an @gmail.com account.

That makes the request pure spam in my mind.

Ask me for a reciprocal link and your request gets trashed.

The "link requests" I most often link to go something like this...
------------
Hi ken;
Our business, (Business name), located in (city, state) sells (something related to my niche) and I was hoping you'd take a look at our website at "example.com" site and link to it.

Thanks,
Name & title
Business name
Business address
City, State,Zip
[e-mail]
Phone #
--------------------

I almost never send a reply email saying if I will link to the site or not.

Another point is that I (and I suspect many others) might not actually get around to creating the link for days, weeks, or even months. That might make it harder to tell if the link request worked or not.

.

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

You should be asking "how many emails until I'm blacklisted and my email is marked perma-spam?".

Get in touch via IM or twitter or phone or in some other way besides email if you can and don't make it your primary way of working on backlinks, it's not very effective.

[MatthewHamilton]

I agree that it is at best a low yield option and welcome your suggestions - you mentioned twitter - have you employed this methodology with success in the past?

[pbmadman]

I don't know how to link to a message on another topic, so I'll copy it here as well since it's just as applicable to this topic. If it's possible and someone can point me to the documentation I couldn't find about linking to other topics, let me know. Thanks.

Original Message:

1) (Though I'm sure I'll get some flack for this one since it's gray hat.) I wrote a bot that searches for high PR pages of relevant keywords to my new pages and sends a request that looks personalized that asks for a link exchange. In the request, I have a link to a tool I wrote that checks that the recipient linked to my page and automates the act of adding a reciprocal link to theirs. Sadly, my only 10% of recipients even look at my page and 1-2% add back links. I limit the email to 100-200 recipients depending on the topic.

2)I haven't tried this but plan on it... setting up amazon usernames and adding in my profile that I am the editor of LINK: widget dot com. Then I could review relevant books about widgets.

3) I also haven't tried creating videos about widgets with links from youtube and other video sites.

4) I also haven't tried writing a bot that uses the twitter API to post tweets with trending hashtags that are related to widget pages that I have.

So many ideas, so little time :-)

[majjk]

What % of Emails Sent Out Requesting a Link are Even Answered?

For me... 10-15% reply says no thanks and just as many accept the link exchange. So 20-30%. Not bad me thinks. I write custom emails for each recipient, no mass mail.

[Lame_Wolf]

If you want more people to reply to link requests, there are a few things to do that will guarantee a higher % rate.

I receive a number of requests for link exchanges. I delete 99.9% of them for the following reasons.

1: Your site is not related to mine. I have clear linking details on the site. If you cannot bother to read them, I cannot be bothered to reply.

2: You want a link from my well established site with your brand new site, and continue to tell me how benificial it will be for me, and how many visitors you will send me.

3: Your site is still under construction.

4: Your letter states what page you want your link on, and once I have added it, you will then add yours. You tell me that your link is on example.com/links.php But when I go there, it is on .../links.php?loadofoldb*ll*cks ... and not cached. Plus it's full of totally unrelated links.

5: No/little/wrong salutation.

When I used to look for link exchanges, I would thoroughly check out a site. I would make sure it was related [of course], white hat, pages were cached, link pages were not FFA.

I would try and find out the name of the owner, their linking details, and any other info I may need.

Then I would add their details to my site, wait for it to be cached by the 3 major search engines.

Once that was all done, I would then write to the person by name. Politely ask if they will link to a related site, even asking if they would like any of the details altered.

I would tell them what page their link was on, and that it was already cached by Google etc. and provide the links for them to check.

My link pages were all in html, never too many per page, and not too many pages, and of course, all related.

I gave all that up years ago. I found out it was better to make a professional looking site with content good enough for sites to want to link to it without asking. YMMV

HTH
LW

[piatkow]

I would try and find out the name of the owner, their linking details, and any other info I may need.

Then I would add their details to my site, wait for it to be cached by the 3 major search engines.

Once that was all done, I would then write to the person by name. Politely ask if they will link to a related site, even asking if they would like any of the details altered.

I can't add anything to that, its the approach that I use as well.

[Goodfellas]

Wouldn't that then just be a reciprocal link? Thereby reducing the value of the link...