Imagine you had a SaaS that provides email verification, and there was a listicle ranking on page one of Google for "email verification services."
You'd want to be on the list, right?
How do you make it happen..or better yet, how do you get onto a dozen such lists?
That's what I want to show you today.
We scored 12 such listicle links for our client in the education space from sites like Hubspot, Dialpad and EdApp.
Here’s a simple breakdown of how ⬇️
Key Elements for Success
To get good results, you need 2 things:
1️⃣ A sizeable prospect list
2️⃣ A compelling offer
Building Your Prospect List
Here’s our process for creating a sizeable prospect list QUICKLY:
➡️ Build a list of 10-20 competitor domains that have high DR
➡️ This next part is the key. If you have Ahrefs, their Web Explorer is new and SUPER powerful.
Let’s say my client was BambooHR. I’d take competitors and create this search operator:
(outlinkdomain:[placeholder1] OR outlinkdomain:[placeholder2] OR outlinkdomain:[placeholder3] OR outlinkdomain:[placeholder4] OR outlinkdomain:[placeholder5] OR outlinkdomain:[placeholder6] OR outlinkdomain:[placeholder7]) AND (outlinkdomain:[placeholder8] OR outlinkdomain:[placeholder9] OR outlinkdomain:[placeholder10] OR outlinkdomain:[placeholder11] OR outlinkdomain:[placeholder12] OR outlinkdomain:[placeholder13] OR outlinkdomain:[placeholder14]) NOT outlinkdomain:bamboohdotcom
A competitor's root domains should replace each placeholder. It’s asking Ahrefs to give me a list of URLs that link to at least 2 of these tools but not to my client.
If that sounds confusing, check out my YouTube video about it.
The output was 217 articles with DR 20+.
➡️ Export the list and do some additional bulk filtering to remove URLs with an RD/LD ratio lower than .7, domains with traffic less than 500, and pages with no keyword rankings. (I use Netpeak Checker paired with Ahrefs API for this)
That leaves me with 150 URLs.
Manual Vetting and Outreach
➡️ Next, we manually vet each of these opportunities and launch a Respona campaign.
Respona’s contact finding and new AI email features make the rest easy.
It writes an AI personalized icebreaker, we ask if they’re open to adding a new tool to their listicle, and we offer something in return (usually a link on an upcoming guest post we’re doing).
Achieving Impressive Results
📈 The result was a 76% open rate, 12% response rate, and some of the best, most natural links to my client’s commercial pages.
I hope this gives you some ideas for your own campaigns. With the right mix of tools - even the most tedious campaigns become easy.
2 mins read
