Law#13 of the 48 Laws of Power
When asking for help, appeal to people's
self-interest, never to their mercy or gratitude.
I
have never fully subscribed to this entirely mercenary philosophy. I do believe
in the basic goodness of mankind and I also believe people do things for others
out of gratitude and mercy. But, if
like me you consider yourself human, then like us all, you have an ego. You
crave validation as do we all. This is the underlying emotional reality that
makes law #13 my favorite when it comes to link requests.
We’ve all seen the emails,(thousands
of them),telling us some site has linked to us and if we’ll link back blah,
blah, blah. A classic example of trying to appeal to my gratitude. Using this approach, you can expect a 1%
success rate on a consistent basis.
Or the one explaining how search
engines rank websites and exchanging links will help us both. Again, the
you-scratch-my-back-and-I’ll-scratch-yours is not appealing to THEIR self-interest,
it is appealing to yours and simply a variation of appealing to their
gratitude. 1% is yours!
Of course there is the time factor
and there are times when a 1% makes sense when comparing time/cost to ROI. But
there are those links that represent a value of 1000 to 1 and often one link
from the right source can move a money term right to the top virtually
overnight. Those types of links are worth investing in.
The technique I’m about to reveal is
one that I have used for some time although sparingly due to the time and
cost factor. BUT I’ve always felt it was kind of a secret weapon and was hesitant to discuss it openly.
However, this past two months I’ve
had occasion to discuss a variation of the technique with a client and then a
question came up at SEO Community Forums,(the premier SEO forum online in my
opinion), which I decided to answer privately as a way to try to contribute to
the community and pay it forward for such a great resource.
So, feeling the cat’s out of the bag
so to speak AND accepting that smart/good SEO’s have already thought of it or
soon will and the dumb ones won’t get it anyway, here it
goes.
Question for the Week of July
17th, 2008
Originally Posted by XXX XXXX XXXXXX
Hey Massa,
Could you share your killer email intro; we're not winning too many links just
emailing, maybe 1 or 2 per 100 customised emails.
Thanks.
the trick is to not ask for a link, ask for an interview. the subject
line says something like
Request for interview
then introduce yourself in three lines or less, and tell them what you read of
theirs that makes you want to interview them and then explain what you will do
with the interview, (place it on your site, on your blog and distribute it to
RSS for example ), keep it brief! These are busy people who have little time for you.
Then ask them 5-6 questions keeping in mind their time is valuable
Be sure to give them a url where you will place the article they can copy and
paste as well as click on to see.
DO NOT ASK FOR A LINK. That is the
secret.
You will see your success rate go to 40% to 75%!
Don't worry about the ones you don't get focus on the ones you do.
You always
have to decide how much work you want to do for which link but what we do when
we are targeting a quality, authority link is we simply assume we are going to
get the link by building a page with our header and footer but the title of the
page is something about the interviewee with their name and a brief bio as an
industry leader and then the body just says coming soon.
that way, when they click the link they will see we are serious and already did
the work.
it's very effective
but if it is a link we don't care that much about we just send the url which is
dead of course and then if they email back about not seeing the page it gives
us a chance to sell the idea and we then have a contact and 90%+ of the time, an
interview.
Good luck
Understanding The Trick
and
What Makes it Work for You, Them and the Web
What’s the Trick? The trick is ----
there is no trick.
If you attempt to use this technique
as a fast, easy way to get authority links, you’ll find yourself doing a lot of
work with greatly reduced returns. If you automate the process, (which I’m
pretty sure some of you will thereby diminishing the value to us all.), you
will insult the intelligence of your target, you will soil your own good name
and the image and value of your site. Of course if there is a potential increase
from 1% to 1.001% then I expect the old “if one is good then 10 million must be
better” philosophy to apply. Such is the way of the web.
BUT, if you use this technique to
secure linking relationships and valuable, industry-specific content for your site
and your visitors, you get the links from industry thought leaders, you provide
hi-quality content for your visitors, you make Google look good by placing your
content in front of their visitors and you contribute to the overall quality of
the web.
Choose people to interview whom you
genuinely respect. People who you actually know something about because you have
engaged yourself in their content.
Ask questions that give them the
opportunity to express their views on issues that are important to the industry
and to your visitors.
Be honest and tell them what you
will do and then DO IT!
The Basic Technique
Just
a suggestion
Build a page, (sub domains can work
very well too), named Press or in the News of similar and link to it from the
index page.
On this page provide links to:
News stories about you or your site,
(by far the most impressive)
Press releases (also strong for
trust builders)
Industry related stories
Blog comments about you or your site
LIST OF PROMINENT FIGURES IN THE
INDUSTRY YOU HAVE INTERVIEWD
(or plan to but haven’t got to it
yet.)
On each of the Interviewee pages,
use your sites’ logos, headers, sidebars, etc but display their name and a
short bio of them
Hints
and Tips
When
building these pages pay attention to your anchor text.
Do
the same when asking the questions in the interview
Do
the Research to locate your targets.
Become
familiar with them, their site and what others have said about them so you can
use that in your bio and in your introduction email. Positive or negative
comments about them from other people are good for openers.
EXAMPLE:
John
Dow of bigmouth.com said in his blog, (provide link here), that you have never
given proper credit to your employees. How do you respond to that?
Include
links to their site where appropriate and make sure they get clicked so they
show up in their referrers
When you get an interview completed,
place it on the page you already have set up for that person making sure to end
with a thank you and a link to their site. Make sure the links get clicked.
Promote the site like you would any
other page or target you cared about. Blog about it. Rss it. Social tag it.
Create videos where appropriate. Get links to it so it starts placing, etc.
etc. etc.
Remember to NEVER ask for a link in
the emails you send but you’ll be amazed at how often the target links to your
interview on his site, on his blog and on his profile pages from Myspace,
Facebook, Twitter,etc. He will tell his friends, his family, his employees his
vendors and his competitors. Why? Because you showed respect and that is validation !
A Couple of Cool Tricks We’ve
Discovered
Aaron Wall of SEObook.com has
written another great article about the perception of value. Do yourself a favor and read it if you haven’t already.
http://www.seobook.com/value-perception-and-perception-value
These are just a couple of goodies that we have found to
increase that perception.
Follow up with a Thank You for the Interview email. Tell
them how many people have commented, how many people have linked, how many
people have clicked his link. Tell them anything and everything good about
their contribution. (validation!)
There must be a million free hit counters out there that publicly
display visitors to a page. These aren’t a bad idea in this case. (this is
probably the ONLY time I’ll ever recommend using these things). If you use good title and H tags, promote it
even half assed, you’ll get hits and it’s not a bad thing to have the
interviewee check out your page and see that 300 or 3000 people has viewed his
interview ; )
Free hit
counter that seems to work the best
http://extremetracking.com/
And one more tip for good measure. It doesn't hurt to set up an email account press@yourdomain.com to send the interview requests from. This helps in a lot of ways and not a bad idea even if you never do a single interview.
So, ya got the cahonies to leave your own tips and cool twists? Leave 'em here and I'll be glad to praise 'em or put 'em down.
Peace y’all
G
Turn
that TV down Damnit! Are ya deaf?
PS
I should probably mention that I'm back in India now until November. If you are calling me, keep in mind my day is probably your night.