How to Get More Traffic Through Back Links and Cold Outreach with Andy Cabasso

Intro: Hey everybody, and welcome to Episode 233 of How I Built It, the podcast that offers actionable tech tips to small business owners. Now, in today’s episode, I’m talking to Andy Cabasso about something that frustrates me endlessly. And that is backlink requests.

They’re frustrating and annoying because most people don’t take the time to understand my business. But Andy says there’s a better way. So he’s going to tell us the right way to do backlink requests, podcast guest outreach, and so much more.

Thanks to this week’s sponsors, TextExpander and Nexcess. You’ll hear about them later in the show. We’re going to talk about all of the show notes that you can find over at streamlined.fm/233.

And if you are listening to Build Something More, or you’re interested, we’re going to be talking about domain authority. That’s for members only. So if you want to become a member to get ad-free, extended episodes, early release and so much more, you can head over to streamlined.fm/233. There’ll be a link right there to join the club for just five bucks a month, or 50 bucks a year.

Okay, now let’s get into the episode with Andy.

Joe Casabona: Hey, everybody, and welcome. Welcome to another episode of How I Built It, the podcast that offers actionable tech tips for small business owners. My name is Joe Casabona. I’m your host. It’s Episode 233. And today our guest is Andy Cabasso. He’s the founder of Postaga.

I’m really excited because we’ve talked a couple of times about potentially getting you on the show. I’m excited to have you on the show now. The timing was good. And the topic is very interesting to me. It’s about getting press coverage, blog mentions, and podcast guest spots with digital PR, something that I can definitely do some work on. But I mean, I’ve been talking a lot already. So let’s bring in Andy. Andy, how are you doing?

Andy Cabasso: I’m doing good, Joe. How about you?

Joe Casabona: I’m doing swell. Thanks so much for asking. I’m excited about this because back in November 2020, I hired Brittaney Lynn of the Human Connection Podcast and the Human Connection Agency. And she helped me put together kind of a plan for outreach and things like that. And she was splendid. I could not recommend Brittaney Lynn highly enough.

But now it’s up to me to kind of implement this. And I was doing well for a while, and then I feel like I’m being pulled in a lot of different directions for content and how to get on to other people’s podcasts if I don’t know them personally and things like that. So I’m excited to talk to you about this.

Let’s start at the beginning though. Tell us a little bit about who you are and what you do.

Andy Cabasso: Sure. Well, where to begin? Long story short, I come from a digital marketing background. I started, grew, and then sold a successful digital agency. And from some of the experiences that we had in building an agency, we built Postaga, which provides a platform to help you do outreach for link building and digital PR and sales to find the right relevant people, get their contact info, their email addresses, and then create personalized pitches for them. That’s the 30 second summary of where I’m at.

Joe Casabona: Nice. Very nice. That digital agency, is that the one that you did with Sam Brodie, former guest and friend of the show?

Andy Cabasso: Yeah.

Joe Casabona: I’ll link that in the show notes. You’ll be able to find everything we talked about in the show notes over at streamlined.fm/233.

So you mentioned a couple of things already that I’m excited to dig into. The first is link building. I recently joined a backlinks circle. I don’t know what to call it. But it’s like a group of us, we… there’s like a person at the center of it who places backlinks strategically. Not like link farms. Like if you’re around the web in like 2000, you had the forums and the pages and link farms and Nuke PHP, I think was the forum everybody was using. So you just have all these backlinks, but Google’s wised up to that.

Andy Cabasso: Yeah, that doesn’t work anymore. Just like having words stuffed on to a page don’t work anymore, having things hidden in clear text doesn’t work anymore. We have to be smarter now.

Joe Casabona: Yeah, absolutely. Maybe we could talk about that in the post-show, kind of the history of trying to fool Google. But it’s all part of a program where there… it’s actually relevant linked text. That’s, I think, probably the important part of link building here. I want to talk about that for sure.

And then the other thing is, like you said, find the appropriate contact information and send personalized pitches. This is what I try to do for my guests. And it’s mostly automated with an Airtable. But then there’s a field for personal note where all the same details are filled in. And then I say like, “And I loved your episode or whatever, or your blog is blah, blah.” So how important is a personalized pitch in these situations?

Andy Cabasso: Sure. As I’m sure you probably personally are on the receiving end of a lot of unsolicited pitches from random people to be a guest on your podcast, I think it’s important for people doing outreach to recognize that, that bloggers and podcasters, and media are getting pitched every day by tons of people, a lot of whom are not spending a good amount of time to ensure that their pitches are personalized.

And so if you’re on the receiving end of that, and you open an email, and the email says, “Hello, I would love to be a guest on your podcast,” or “I have a perfect piece of content that would be a great fit for your article,” that email is going either to get deleted or spam folder or they’re just seeing the email preview and they’re like, “All right, going to forget this.”

So it’s incredibly important to personalize so that you can, one, demonstrate that you’ve done the research to show the person who’s on the receiving end that you know who they are and that what you’re about to share with them is relevant for them. That’s probably the biggest thing. And that really helps with getting your open rates higher and your response rates higher.

Especially because the worse your emails perform the less… like if your emails don’t reach the destinations, if they bounce because you haven’t found the right person’s email address and you have low deliverability, it’s going to make it more likely that your emails end up in spam folders, which is no good and no one wants.

Joe Casabona: Yeah, for sure. And that’s happened to me a few times, where people are like, “Hey, did you see my email?” And I’m like, “No, it went to spam.” So, absolutely. On top of demonstrating you did the research… First of all, I get a lot of the generic “hey, here’s four paragraphs on why my guest is the greatest person to ever live and why you should interview him.” And I’m just thinking, “What is in it for my audience?”

That’s perhaps the number one question that you need to answer. Why should I have your person on my podcast? I don’t want to hear that they graduated from Harvard with a 4.0. Harvard is exclusively smart people. So, what makes you unique, I guess?

Andy Cabasso: What I found in particular, I’ve seen a lot of pitches sent by PR agencies, and some of them baffle me the most because some of them follow a particular specific format that if I were on the receiving end of that I would not be interested in it at all. Specifically, I’m happy to share a pitch that has worked very well for me.

Joe Casabona: Yeah, absolutely.

Andy Cabasso: Kind of just breaking it down line by line. Typically, when I’m prospecting, and let’s say I found a relevant podcast, and it’s in the same industry as that I’m trying to connect with or it reaches the audience that I’m trying to reach. So great, I found that podcast, it’s relevant, I have found the host of the podcast or producer, I have found their contact information, I got their email address, here is what I’m going to say to them in that email—the first email.

“Hey (insert person’s first name), I was recommended your podcast and I have a few episodes queued up. I’m excited to check it out. I wanted to see if you are recording episodes or looking for guests within the next month. If so, I’d love to be a guest. Here are some ideas I have for an episode. (And then insert relevant topics for episodes). And then following that, here’s why I think I would be a great guest. (And then insert relevant information on why I would be a great guest specific to that audience).”

Also, if you have your own podcast as well, I try and insert a line offering some reciprocation. Like, “Also, I have a podcast related to this audience. I would love to do a podcast swap, maybe have you on as a guest as well. Let me know what you think.” And that’s it.

It’s a very simple pitch. First, demonstrate being upfront. “I would like to be a guest. Here’s what I want to talk about that is relevant to your industry. Here is why I would be a good guest.” And if you have something reciprocal to offer as well, adding that in. And that gets a very good response rate. I’ve personally been on two dozen podcasts in the last year or so. And I do not have a podcast.

Joe Casabona: Wow. It makes sense. First of all, if you are listening, and you’re like, “Wow, he just had a lot of things when I have to listen to this again,” we have-

Andy Cabasso: Let’s take it line by line.

Joe Casabona: We have transcripts. So you can go read the transcript to get kind of all the main points Andy he hit there. I think that’s really important. Because again, you talked about the benefit. In my own experience, Brittaney and her team set me up with three different pitches based on the topic I was pitching, which was based on the audience of the podcast I was pitching. One of my pitches was building online courses. I’m not going to pitch that to like a restaurant podcast or whatever, right?

Andy Cabasso: Yeah.

Joe Casabona: For the restaurant podcast I’m pitching, why your website needs to be good, why is every restaurant website crappy. And that’s helpful. So you need to show the benefit to the hosts, to the audience. And the reciprocity thing is really good. I’m just going to add to that podcasters are more likely to have other podcasters on because they know what to do. That’s not like a dig or anything at people who don’t have podcasts. Andy, you filled out my form, right?

Andy Cabasso: Right.

Joe Casabona: So you know that I have this disclaimer: I’ll use a good mic. I’ll use headphones.

Andy Cabasso: And almost every podcast I am on has similar disclaimers saying, “Please make sure you have a good mic, make sure that you have wired internet if possible, that you are in an area free from distraction.” Usually something like, “Please listen to an episode of my podcast actually before we come on so that you kind of have a sense of what this is about. Because if you’re doing cold outreach, or if you’re reaching out through an agency, I’m maybe a little concerned that you are just going in this blind and don’t know the audience of this podcast in particular.

Joe Casabona: Right. Right. I actually recently on our pre-recorded call, right? So Andy I talked for about 15 minutes before we hit the record button here. Where I go through a checklist. Well, I turned my first person ever away at that point. And I’ll tell that story and Build Something More. So stick around to the end, and I’ll tell that story. I don’t want to name shame or give enough details that they know who I’m talking about. But I mean, it’s really important. And so having a podcaster or somebody who reads instructions is super important.

So the pitch is really important. I think when you pitch this idea in particular, the get press coverage and blog mentions was what struck me the most. Because I put out a lot of content. I put out a podcast on Mondays, a YouTube video, a live stream, and a blog post, one a week, every week for all four of those things.

And I know content is a long game, but I’d like to shorten the game a little bit. I’d like to try to get more different eyeballs on my content. So when you pitched this topic, I thought it was super, super interesting. So maybe we can just start with the basic question.

Andy Cabasso: Sure.

Joe Casabona: If I write good content will people just come to it?

Andy Cabasso: If you already have an audience, maybe. But if you’re starting from scratch, probably not. You can try and grow your audience organically. But depending on your market, everything is very, very competitive now. It’s just gotten more competitive over time.

I know plenty of people who were having businesses in the early days of the Internet and they would talk about how they would just publish something or create a page and they would get customers and it would be great. Like my agency used to be in the market, that I had before was in the market of doing web design for law firms.

I would talk to some lawyers who were like, “You know, I had a website in 1998 and it was great because I was the only person in my city who had a website for his law firm in 1998. And I got clients from it, and they paid me so much money, and it was great.” And it’s like, “Yeah, that’s cool, but now everyone’s caught up to you. Everyone else is seeing the value that that those customers and that traffic is bringing. So now you have to really step it up if you haven’t yet.”

So when you create content, I try and spend as much time promoting my content as I do actually writing it. Which maybe sounds crazy. But if the goal here is to get more eyeballs and help it make it so the content ranks well in Google and makes it so my website ranks in Google, I have to outcompete everyone else writing on that topic.

And what we’ve seen is that of all the hundreds of ranking factors that Google has, one that has an exceptionally high correlation with your search ranking is the quality and quantity of links to your website and to your content. So the more authoritative websites that link to your blog post, that link to your website and your content, the better it’s going to rank in Google better, it’s going to show up, and ultimately, the more traffic and customers that you can drive to your site. So given that it’s important to be able to get links, we’ve spent time and invest that time in finding relevant websites that can link to our content and reach out to them.

There are a lot of different strategies that people do to get links to their content. I’ll talk about a few different ones. But probably the one that gets the most name recognition is the skyscraper technique that was pioneered by Brian Dean from Backlinko. Real quick summary of it is you want to rank for a particular search term, you see what articles are ranking already on that term and who is linking to them. So you can use a tool like Ahrefs, or SEMrush, or Ubersuggest, and you can see the backlink profiles of these top-ranking articles.

So let’s say I want to write an article on social media strategies, and I see like, All right, here’s the top-ranked article. They have links from 500 websites. I’m going to write a better article than that top-ranked article. And then I’m going to, using that research tool, that Ahrefs, that SEMrush or Ubersuggest, I can extract the backlink profiles of that site and then find contacts at all of those websites and kind of pitch those sites to say, “Hey, I saw that you’re really great article on this topic. I saw that you linked to this article on social media. I wanted to give you a heads up that that article is out of date. I’ve written a much better article on that topic that is more thorough, better.” And basically pitch those websites to link to your article instead. That’s the ultimate goal of skyscraper technique.

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Joe Casabona: I do want to give a quick rundown of linkbacks. Because linkbacks in Google, as a ranking factor, has been around as long as Google itself, right? This has always been the linchpin of how Google figures out what good content is out there. And the way I would explain it to my students when I taught kind of an intro to computer course in the classroom was if you need a mechanic, are you just going to open the Yellow Pages and pick the first number you find? Or are you going to ask your dad or your mom or your friend who they recommend and go to them? That’s essentially what a backlink is doing. It’s a personal recommendation to this specific content.

Andy Cabasso: That’s exactly right. In the earliest days of search engines, it didn’t used to be that Google was the only one out there. There was Yahoo and Dogpile and X-Site and all these other search engines where they would manually curate the search results basically.

And that wasn’t really very scalable, so Google figures out, “How do we shortcut this? Well, let’s create our algorithm in it. We’ll place more emphasis and value on the quality and quantity of links to a particular page, because that kind of tells us that that page is authoritative on the subject matter.” So if everyone’s linking to this article on this topic, it’s probably the most relevant one.

Joe Casabona: Right. Right. You mentioned keyword stuffing, right?

Andy Cabasso: Hmm.

Joe Casabona: The way Yahoo used to work is if I wanted a website about dogs, Yahoo would just be like, “This web page has the word ‘dog’ the most.” So it’s kind of the difference between me saying, “I am the expert here, and other people saying Joe is the expert here. Andy is the expert here.” So let me ask you, because I do get these backlink pitches a lot.

Andy Cabasso: Sure.

Joe Casabona: A tip for anybody listening, I’m not going to add them to How I Built, any website on How I Built It. I’ve got sponsors who pay for those links. The links are relevant to what we mentioned. If you find something on casabona.org that you want me to link back to, I would be more open to it.

But I get, again, pretty bad pitches. Somebody asked me a link to a blog post I wrote in 2006 that was like two sentences about how excited I was about Halo coming out. I said, “Are you only asking the linkback here because the page is so old?” They did not respond. I guess what’s the value proposition here? On the surface, it’s I’m going to give my readers more relevant information. Just me linking back, how has my website helped here, though, in general?

Andy Cabasso: Sure. I guess from the perspective of the person who’s pitching you, they want you to link to them because you linking to them is going to be more valuable for them. For them in their pitch, they really need to demonstrate some value for you and for your audience. Usually, the standard go-to is “Oh, yeah, the content that you’re linking to is very out of date. You should link to my content instead.”

But there are a few different pitches that I’ll get into in a sec. But with the skyscraper technique, in particular, the pitch is typically to the effect of the information that you’re sharing to people. Like, your existing audience is outdated, so you should update your article. And then by you updating your article, you’re providing some fresh material for your audience.

Joe Casabona: Just to interrupt you here, this is kind of based on, hey, this thing that you are linking to, I figured out that you are linking to it and I want to give you something more relevant.

Andy Cabasso: That’s right.

Joe Casabona: You have demonstrated that you want to share this resource with your audience. It’s not just like, “Hey, I see you write about LMS is here. Link to my LMS.”

Andy Cabasso: Right. That is another approach as well. But with a good pitch for a skyscraper technique that I’ve seen more effective is there is some element of reciprocity to it. So if you’re a blogger on the receiving end of these kinds of pitches, you’ve probably gotten a lot of these pitches.

The ones that stand out, I guess, first, they demonstrate relevance that they know who they’re reaching out to, like they demonstrate all right, you know our article, you know what we’re linking to. So you’ve done some basic research there.

Second, maybe you have something to offer further for our audience. Like I’ve seen some pitches where, as an example, a web hosting company was doing a skyscraper technique. And in their pitch, they offer an affiliate account or a free account at their site in exchange for that backlink. And that can make the recipient more open to that. It’s like, “All right, it’s not just for me, give me that link. Thank you.” It’s they’re providing some additional level of value there, too. That’s kind of with the skyscraper technique.

Joe Casabona: Let me ask then. My yearly theme—I’ll link to the yearly theme episode in the show notes too—my yearly theme is The Year of Opportunity. By just discarding any requests for linkbacks, am I potentially leaving money or good opportunities on the table? Have I looked at this the wrong way, where I think it’s a purely selfish act by the requester?

Andy Cabasso: Well, I will say that sometimes the content that people are providing you is going to be more relevant and more helpful to your audience. From your perspective, you’re probably like, “Well, then I have to go into my website and swap out a link. And that’s going to take time and effort on my part.” I will say that, having sent out lots of link request pitches, I’ve seen a lot of websites where they will send back a template email saying, “What you’re looking for is a sponsorship opportunity.”

Joe Casabona: I’ve sent that. I’ve sent that very same email. Especially how I Built It. I don’t do this but-

Andy Cabasso: Sure. And it’s like, “All right, getting a link insertion is going to be anywhere from $50 to $500, depending on what our domain rating is, and how relevant our website is to your audience. We also have other opportunities for things like guest blog posts. And if you want to provide some additional value to our audience, maybe we you can write an article specifically for our audience, and we’ll get you a link in there. But you’re we’re going to be providing some brand new content that’s good quality and relevant for our audience. So that’s a win win for everybody.”

Joe Casabona: Got you.

Andy Cabasso: That’s something else there too.

Joe Casabona: Cool.

Andy Cabasso: But also sometimes you might want to… like more experienced link builders can be wary of websites that have a template response for like paid link insertions. Because there are some sites where that’s a big part of their business model. So they just insert tons of links from every website that’ll reach out to them. And it might be of varying quality. But if you’re linking out to thousands or tens of thousands of other websites just because they’re paying you, it might not be the best quality link. That’s a more in-depth thing to get into in terms of evaluating opportunities.

Joe Casabona: I mean, that essentially you’re turning your website into a link farm. It kind of reminds me of that episode of How I Met Your Mother where Marshall.. like his recommendations… he was a stamp tramp, right?

Andy Cabasso: Yeah.

Joe Casabona: Where his recommendations weren’t good because he just basically recommended anybody that he was nice to. Awesome. Let’s get to the actionable advice. Let’s get to the actual advice.

Andy Cabasso: Sure.

Joe Casabona: You’ve already given us some really good background for how to pitch and how to make it relevant and highlight the benefit for the content creator. If I wanted to start today with, you know, kind of getting a little bit more coverage and linkbacks, what should I do? What are maybe the first two or three steps I should take?

Andy Cabasso: The first thing I would do is I would inventory my content, figure out what’s the best content in particular. Because from the perspective of the recipient, you want to make sure that the content you’re going to be linking to is very good quality. I’m sure you’ve gotten pitches and people who get pitches see people saying, like, “Hey, can you link to my article?” and the article isn’t very good or it isn’t very thorough. So you want to make sure that you’re pitching your top-quality stuff. In particular, the longer your content is, the more thorough it is the better and kind of take stock of all that.

There are different strategies that we do for prospecting. I mentioned the skyscraper technique is one type of strategy. But there are others. For example, link roundup outreach, which I only do based on certain industries. So a link roundup being an article where on a weekly or monthly basis, someone posts a blog post, like, “Here are the latest articles in x topic.” And that’s basically an article, it’s a collection of links to other people’s articles. It’s very common in spaces like digital marketing, and SEO, and web design, but maybe not the most common in more niche areas.

So if there are not really people publishing link roundup articles in your space, then there’s nothing you can do there. But if you are finding people who are doing link roundups in your space, that can be great because in particular, those blogs are actively looking for content every day, every week. And if you can provide them with something that’s really good quality, they’re going to publish, they’re going to link to your article, and you’ve now built a relationship with them after that first interaction, and you can follow up and in the future, send more articles their way. So you’re not just reaching out to a stranger anymore, it’s someone who trust you and your content.

Joe Casabona: Yeah. Real quick, I want to reinforce that point because it’s the same thing with podcast guests pitches. Generally, I will have everybody who pitches me fill out this form that again goes to Airtable, and then I either accept or reject, and they get an email based on that.

But there are a couple of people who can just go around the forum. I implicitly trust the people that they are recommending because they understand my show so well. And they have a track record of recommending like three, four or five really good guests. So forming that relationship I think is really important.

And a quick follow-up. I hope I didn’t throw you off your game now. But if you do, let’s say for the link roundup specifically because I was doing link roundups for a while, or even for a WP Review, for my other podcast, I do the link roundups, if you get in as a link there, is it more likely that you might not have to ask for links in the future? WP Owls is a good example. Like I found one really good place that they linked from, and now I check them weekly to see what news is happening.

Andy Cabasso: So if you’re the one publishing, chances are if there are people that you’re adding content from regularly, you’re probably going to be subscribing to their newsletters and seeing what they’re publishing. And so those are going to be some of the go to sources for you for the future.

Joe Casabona: Nice. Awesome. So, inventory your content, look at what’s best because you want to pitch your top quality stuff, generally longer in-depth is better. I’m glad you said that. My blog posts are generally short and cover a specific topic. But I guess, is short like 400 words or short like 1,200 words? Is long like 5,000 words?

Andy Cabasso: Short content can be like 300 to 500 words. In general, I wouldn’t discourage promoting that content if in that space you have something very specific, actionable, and relevant to share, and like that would be a good fit for some other articles. But the articles that I try and promote are generally like 1,500 plus words. Yeah, the longer the better, because if someone’s going to click a link and look at the article, they’re going to see, okay, there’s a table of contents here, so there’s a lot to it.

I’ve seen so many pitches, and the least successful I find are the ones that don’t have a good grasp of the quality of their content in that. They’re just like, “Hey, here’s my article.” And it’s like, “Uh, this article isn’t good.”

Joe Casabona: Got you. So quality definitely matters more than word count.

Andy Cabasso: Or like pitching an article that’s the same article on a topic that’s been written about hundreds, thousands of times. Like, why you need a mobile responsive website. We’ve all seen that article. We’ve all written that article. So the content that you have hopefully has some new take or approach, something maybe more data-focused, and a lot more to add than what else is out there.

Joe Casabona: Got you. Got you. That makes sense. Another example maybe is what microphone should I have for my podcast. Lots of people are answering that question. Versus I did a launcher podcast for $100 or less. That’s more specific, there’s a spin on it. And at least when I wrote it, I didn’t see a whole lot like that.

Andy Cabasso: Yeah. So there are definitely like, with your content, thinking about the approaches that you want to take, ways to make it stand out. One thing I like to do is before I start writing, take a look at the top 5 or 10 articles on a given topic, see what they’re doing well, see what the gaps are so that you can fill those gaps and add more to it that they’ve missed.

It could be relatively easy to see like, all right, here… let’s take an example of social media again. There are about a dozen articles on 10 social media trends for the year or whatever. Well, you can curate all of those, let’s say, and now you’ve got 30, 50 trends and you’ve included all of them in your mega article. It takes all that into consideration.

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And now let’s get back to it.

Joe Casabona: That reminds me of I was helping somebody with an article they were doing about… not helping them. They asked for some advice and it was like best SEO WordPress themes. I did a quick Google search, I found like five articles. Divvy was at the top of all of them. I think Astra one just kind of listed StudioPress themes.

And I was like, “You know what? Kadence is a theme I’ve been using a lot that it’s fast and well made. That’s not in any of these.” I was like, “Maybe recommend that one.” Hopefully, the article publishes before this episode comes out, I guess. I reckon it will. I think that’s a really good point. Fill in the gaps and to the questions that that aren’t being answered.

We are coming up on time. I know you were going through a couple of different types of techniques. If you want to finish that up.

Andy Cabasso: Yeah. So other things like… I call it resource outreach. I like to search for those articles that are number… let’s say, like I said before, 50 social media trends for the year or something like that, or social media tools or social media resources, like number followed by the topic, followed by resources. You can see those articles generally link to other people’s articles.

So what we can do is we can reach out to them and say, “Hey, I really liked your article about social media resources. I’ve written an article, specifically on social media something. I think if you’d add my article to your list, it’d be a great addition to your resource page.” That kind of thing to offer is a similar approach in pitch as the link Roundup kind of articles in that that article is seeking content. And by you providing that is an easy thing for them to add to provide additional value for their audience. And a way to say like, “update that page.”

The last one in terms of blog post promotion that I’m thinking about is… I call it mentioned outreach. So whenever I have an article, I will, in my article, link to other people’s websites when it’s in relevant contexts. You can then reach out to those websites to say, “Hey, I really liked your article. I mentioned it in my article. It would be great if you could either link to it or another article of mine or share my article. I’m helping you out kind of situation. Like, “I’ve already done something.” So offer that and get some reciprocation out of that.

Joe Casabona: Interesting. That one has also happened to me. Like, “Hey, I’m linking to your podcast here.” And I’m like, “Thanks.” Like, “Do you want to link to this?” And I’m like, “No.” Again, if your pitch is honed properly. Maybe if they said, “Hey, I linked to this because I really liked this episode of the podcast. I saw you talks about why authors should start a podcast. Here’s a list of all their podcasts maybe you could link to that,” then maybe I’d be more receptive. Because I’d be like, “Yeah, I actually need better examples because I’m an author, and that’s the example I use.”

I really like these techniques. I’m going to be more open to it. And I’m probably going to try some of them. Because especially I follow HubSpot, and every single thing they post is like “50 plugins that help you with SEO.” And I’m like, “All right.” But they must work. They must. That’s the only content they put out. Gosh, this has been so great. I’ve learned a lot here. We’ve been talking for about an hour now…

Andy Cabasso: Oh, I have one last thing to recommend actually. So, if anyone in the audience has a business where it’s a product, whether it’s an app, a WordPress plugin theme, or anything like that, whatever it is, one type of outreach that I recommend for getting press coverage is basically doing outreach to get reviews by professional bloggers and other websites for your product.

So what I would do is I would see like… let’s say you make a CRM, for example, and there’s HubSpot. You can search for HubSpot reviews let’s say or Salesforce reviews, and you can see who’s writing reviews of these competitors in your industry. Or if not competitors, search for complimentary other related products in your space, find who’s writing reviews about those, and then reach out to them with a pitch of, “Hey, I saw you did this great review of this product. I wanted to see if, since your audience is interested in CRM, if you’d be interested in checking out my app or my product. I’d be happy to give you free access. Let me know what you think.”

That can be a way to get free press coverage on other blogs. I’ve had a lot of success with that as well. Just making sure that your pitch of course is relevant to those bloggers and websites.

Joe Casabona: That is the one that’s been super effective on me. Milanote, for example, was like, “Hey, can you link to us from your users page.” And I’m like, “I need to use it.” And they’re like, “We’ll give you a free forever account.” And I’m like, “All right, I’ll give it a go.” And I loved it. So yeah, they made it on. That is really effective.

It’s just sometimes hard because I do paid video reviews on my YouTube channel. And then there are people who are like, “Hey, I’ll give you my product for free if you review it on YouTube.” As a content creator, you got to walk the line, right? If it’s something maybe I would have reviewed otherwise, then maybe I’m more likely to do it for free or for a free account. But if it’s like something that is not even on my radar, at that point, it’s like, “If you want a paid placed review, then I’m willing to do that.” So that’s true. That’s a story for another episode.

Andy, this has been great. I need to ask you my favorite question, which is, do you have any trade secrets for us?

Andy Cabasso: Yes, I got plenty. Where do I begin? First, one thing that’s important to do is, if you’re doing outreach, we want to protect your main sending domain. So like don’t send from Casabona.org or whatever your main email addresses from. So we set up either an alternate domain or a subdomain to send from just to… Although I’m not anticipating that you’re going to end up in spam or anything like that, we want to protect your main account just in case.

Because if you do get blacklisted and banned, that is not an easy thing to undo. There are companies that maintain black lists. And if your domain ends up on it, then anytime you send a regular email to someone’s email account, or Gmail or anything like that, your emails can end up in spam. So that’s no good.

Aside from that, one other thing that I do with my emails, and it’s important to you is like it’s called warming up your sending domains. So instead of going from like zero emails to 100 emails in a day, which mail servers will look suspicious, we send out a few emails a day and slowly ramp that up over time to look more natural.

And also, oh, this is a big one, don’t use software like MailChimp for sending outreach emails from. MailChimp and marketing automation software was not meant for that. You will most likely get banned from those platforms very quickly. I’ve seen that happen to people as well.

You really want to use an email sending platform, whether it’s [inaudible 00:48:44] or anything else that’s specifically meant for cold outreach, something that is going to not send out 100 emails at once, which is going to look like an email blast, but send out emails staggered over time that looks like a more normal natural cadence that human beings use, which will be much more likely that your emails end up in people’s inboxes rather than spam folders. That’s a hugely important thing.

Another trade secret is in terms of expectations. Outreach is a numbers game. For sending like outreach pitches for like… for a skyscraper technique, you can be doing very well and get like a 5% response rate. Now, that’s 5 good responses out of 100. So for that in particular, you’re going to need to send out a lot of email to a lot of different people to get the quantity of links that you’re looking for. My most successful outreach is for me doing outreach for podcasts, I personally get about a 20% response rate.

Joe Casabona: Wow.

Andy Cabasso: But that’s only 1 in 5. So I need to find a lot of people to reach out to to get the numbers that I’m wanting to get. And of the responses that you’ll get, they’re going to vary. Some people will say, “No thanks,” or “unsubscribe me.” Some of them will demand payment and say, “If you want a link, that’s going to be somewhere between $50 to $500.” And that’s going to vary by a lot of factors.

It’s not necessarily that you should avoid paid link insertions or sponsorship opportunities. I know some people just won’t, but other people are taking approach of it of like as long as this website is legit and it’s a good, relevant opportunity, me getting this link is going to help me rank quicker. So maybe it is worth it. So that’s something to think about as well.

I’m not going to tell you whether or not to take paid opportunities. But if you were to, I would only do it from relevant outreach to relevant websites as opposed to paying for backlinks on Fiverr or Upwork, which I would absolutely never recommend, because you’re going to get a lot of bad quality stuff.

Joe Casabona: Anyone who is productizing backlinking does not have your best interest in mind.

Andy Cabasso: Yeah. All right. I mean, those are my trade secrets.

Joe Casabona: I think those are really good. This is super relevant to a podcast. I just listened to a podcast episode of The Deliverability Podcast by Alyssa and Melissa over at ConvertKit. This has become my favorite podcast because I’m learning a ton. They mentioned like how your main domain needs to kind of gain authority first. So everything you said jives with the general advice they gave. So I’ll make sure to link that in the show notes. But this was really, really good advice.

Andy, we’re going to continue the conversation for a few minutes and Build Something More. But if people want to learn more about you, where can they go?

Andy Cabasso: Sure. My website is postaga.com. That’s postaga.com. We also have a Facebook group dedicated to outreach and digital marketing called Grow Together: SEO. You could find me on Twitter and Facebook at Andy Capasso. And on LinkedIn, I’m Andrew Cabasso. Maybe it sounds a bit more professional, I don’t know. But it is what it is.

Joe Casabona: Awesome. Well, I will link to all of that and more in the show notes over at streamlined.fm/233. If you want to get the pre-show, I should say, where Andy and I talked about live stream recording video smart home setup, and you want to get the post-show where we’re going to talk about old SEO techniques, and I’m going to ask him if HubSpot is an actual good blog, you can sign up over a buildsomething.club for five bucks a month or 50 bucks a year. You’ll get the ad-free extended version of this podcast as well as lots of other extra content.

Andy, thanks so much for joining me today. I really appreciate it.

Andy Cabasso: Thanks, Joe. It has been fun.

Joe Casabona: And thank you to everybody listening. Thanks to our sponsors. And until next time, get out there and build something.