How many follow ups before giving up?
-
What are your thoughts about the contacting process itself. I am targeting sites in relevant industries, with domain authority over 50, asking to be added to resources or comparison pages
1-How long do you wait before sending a second/reminder email?
2-Do you have a template for follow up emails? "Hi, I contacted you a week ago about...."
3-If domain authority is decent (50-60), how many times do you follow up before giving up?
-
Pick up the phone. Often solves the problem fast.
Sending an email is easy and requires no "on the spot" thinking.
Speaking to someone by phone does.
Calling just a few of those potential link prospects will have you quickly examining your value proposition (in a good way) since you will likely flub your first few attempts if your offer has no value.
-
If not by an unsolicited email or call, how do you approach a prospect with an infographic or content you might have for one of their specific pages?
-
These emails offer real business relationships: we ask them to become partners and get nicely paid per lead to a good quality product; or feature each others site as the preferred product provider in relevant pages. I use preciprocity principles, follow/like or link to them ahead of time but the response rate is still low. Until now, a follow up to an unanswered email has not resulted in more responses, so I was thinking about not following up at all and just move on
-
If the emails and followup are unsolicited then yes its spam, and my reaction is the same: to ignore, report as spam and delete.
Gyi is spot on about the overall tactic. Personally I very rarely send unsolicited sales or link requests. I agree those are a waste of time. But if there's already an established connection, then yes absolutely I am tenacious and will pursue the lead for a minimum of 5 times.
-
I refuse to deal with anybody who uses a robo-caller - insta-hang-up and the number is added to my phone's 'reject list'. What they are saying is that THEIR time is too valuable to waste on the call, but they have no problem wasting MY time.
-
You'd have lost it similar to I did once then... I'm always too polite to simply hang up, I just keep repeating politely that I'm not interested for various reasons until they accept it. However, not one time... a telesales guy who was calling to do a 5 minute survey refused to give up. I really was extra busy at the time and told him over and over that I didn't have time and would he please accept no as my answer.
This chap then told me that he would ring me everyday several times per day until I did his survey! He was actually threatening me with daily sales calls.
I went mad, I don't often do that but the damn cheek of it!!
High volumed expletives and frothing at the mouth... I'm not proud of it, but he didn't call back again
Mind you, at least he was human... lately I've been getting called by machines that ring me up and tell me to press button 1, then keep me on hold before passing me to a sales person (I had to go through to ask them to remove me from their list, which was pointless as there's always more).
What is the world coming to lol.
-
You guys are right... it's the "brute force" thing that really bothers me.
The "value to recipient" method would be better - but usually there is no value. lol
-
I totally agree with Gyi. If you are not getting any response, you are not presenting any value to the recipient, or you made it into their junk box. I would reply once and if you don't get a response, adjust your strategy and move on.
-
I think both sides of the earlier responses have merit. However, successful link requests are less about brute force and more about thinking strategically. First, in my experience, unsolicited emails of any kind are a total waste of time, or at least extremely inefficient (not to mention very annoying). Not a good way to start a relationship.
Think about your link requests more like business relationships and less like a sale. Would you spam your colleagues? Your boss?
How do communicate with other professionals? Use that as a template for thinking about how to contact link targets. And don't call them link targets ; ).
-
Thumbs up, Steve....
I report most link requests as "spam" and if I recognize a second request from the same site I block their email address or better their entire domain from my inbox. (Gmail allows an unlimited number of blocked addresses.)
Call me on the phone once and I will tell you nicely not to bother me... call a second time and you will not like what I say.
-
I think that's awful (no offense). I get tonnes of link requests, and other such emails every day. I don't have the time to reply to them and neither should I have to. Some of the emails state that "As they haven't had a reply from me... etc..." And then presume to suggest that I should take time out of my busy day to reply to their unsolicited emails.
Continuing to ask after no reply the first, or even second, or as you say 5th time is not getting the message and is little less than harassment.
A lot of people, like myself don't reply because:
a) It open the doorway to more such spam, and
b) Sometimes replies are little more to the sender than confirmation the email exists and responds so they can sell your data
I think it's rude to keep sending people emails. Why should I have to write "No" hundreds of times per week when I didn't even ask for the email in the first place.
So, what you're saying is that you're one of those people who hassle and bug people like me who are just trying to get on with my work, and you won't ever stop despite the fact that I don't reply?
It gives all of the industry a bad name when people do stuff like that.
Also, why should I have to unsubscribe, when I never subscribed in the first place? Not to mention that most of these requests don't have the option to unsubscribe anyway.
Sorry for the rant, nothing personal but I see it as pressure sales via spam... which I'm surprised works at all to be honest.
-
I think the same principle that applies to sales applies here. This stunning fact is something I've never forgotten once I learned it: 80% of closes happen after FIVE or MORE points of contact.
Most people fail to follow up that many times. Let's say one email, then maybe 1 or 2 reminders via phone/email? Up it to at least five and you'll have a better success rate. Personally for sales, I don't ever stop following up. I must either get a clear YES or a clear NO. (This could be as simple as "Unsubscribe.")
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Do links from such sites as TripAdvisor give any weight or support for SEO
And what about other sites like quora or other niche forums/blogs where one might leave answers, with a link to their profile, which has a link back to the owner's website? _Cindy
Link Building | | cceebar1 -
Do-follow links from social media
I am experimenting with some blogs and online communities for backlinks. The Moz bar shows this link as do-follow, but it has the internal redirecting link. My brain is frozen and I can't remember what it's called to look up how it affects SEO. Can anyone enlighten me?
Link Building | | julie-getonthemap0 -
Inbound link is follow link but we put no follow link back - is it beneficial for rankings?
Dear Moz Community, We are operating in a niche market, where there are not so many content marketing options. What we are left with are link exchanging with relevant sites that are on the same topic but to not directly compete with us. Now we know that if we link back to site A and site a links back to us - for google this is not a very good link. But, some of the sites we are exchanging links with, do not know the term follow vs no follow links. My question - if your link is to site A is a no follow link but they give us a follow link - does it mean thats a better option than a follow vs follow. Thanks for help!
Link Building | | advertisingcloud0 -
Been offered a no follow link on a blog post ?. Is it worth it ?
Hi All, We are having a go at doing our own link building and just wanted some advice on a couple of questions I've found some industry related blog sites which could be good but alot of them only offer a no follow link ?. Is this worth it ? And if ,so what is the advantage of having a no follow link ? as it won't directly help with our DA etc ? I've also noticed some of these sites link to each other or recommend each other (i.e other blog sites) which may be some sort of link network ?.. I take it this is bad ? and could be penalized by google ? thanks pete
Link Building | | PeteC120 -
Are followed links from these high authority domains any good?
Hi Mozzers, I have a link building question, in 2 parts. I am in the UK. We have a large local directory network over here which involves some high authority national news domains. Basically, you get a citation for free but if you go "featured" as well as the benefit of being returned top for keyword searches in the directories, buried under a tab on your page are deep links to your website, and they are followed. What are the risks/benefits of this? Are followed links from other high authority domains like Visual.ly and Behance worth it? They are easy to get and I've always believed an easy link usually isn't a good link. Thanks in advance!
Link Building | | Silkstream0 -
Why does my site only have 4 internal followed links/internal links?
When using Open Site Explorer my site is winning in many categories but lacking in others as compared to competitors. I intend to improve on this but am a little confused by the extremely low number of "internal followed links" and "internal links" at just 4. My competitors have much more than that. Does this mean links to the root domain? Total internal links? I have many internal links so I'm having a hard time figuring this one out. What four internal links are getting noticed? I just went through and changed all the links that went to index.html to link to the root domain at www.njlimocarservice.com as I just found a Q&A that indicates this was better. So as of Wed at 5:45 PM all my links to the homepage went to index.html and not the root which is no longer the case. Not sure if this matters. At the same time I also just put a 301 from index.html to redirect to www.njlimocarservice.com. Any help appreciated! h9QuF.png
Link Building | | kabledesigns0 -
Why bother with Delicious when the bookmarks are no-follow?
i'm wondering why people suggest Delicious as a social bookmarking service for SEO when from what I can see all the urls are set to no-follow?
Link Building | | seanuk0 -
How many links per day to avoid sandbox
Dear Mozers, I start promoting my website www.buy-hosting.net on a daily basis now. I would like to know, how many links would you seed per day. As far as I understood, it is important to stay constant in the number of links to seed every day. But isn't there a danger of going to the sandbox, if the number is to high? The domain has no ibound links yet and although it is 2 years old was only parked until now. Thank you for your advice and kind regards
Link Building | | ie4mac
TImon Michael0