One of the most
important aspects of growing your blog is to have a good number of backlinks.
Backlinks work as
signals which tell the search engine and its crawlers that your website and
content are worthy of getting ranked higher up in the search results.
Organic traffic,
which you get from search engines, is always preferred. More traffic from
search engines means you have readers on your hand who want to read your
content, and you have a higher chance of selling your product (if you are into
affiliate marketing).
Nevertheless, the
bottom line is backlinking helps you rank higher in search engines.
So how do you get
backlinks?
One of the preferred ways is to connect with other people from high authority websites and ask them for a backlink in the form of guest posts and so on.
This process is known as outreach.
Outreach is a
very basic concept, which means connecting with more people, usually to spread
a message. You can channel the same concept to reach people and get backlinks.
But getting the
email address of important people is often hard because they prefer keeping
their mail addresses limited to certain people so that nobody can spam them
with useless info.
Getting the
address is the first crucial step in your backlink outreach program. So here
are some ways you can get the email address to contact.
Why outreach people?
Even without the
purpose of backlinking, outreach is a crucial element of networking.
It is simply not
possible to make your way to the top without having connections. Having
connections can help you while you are facing some problems, know about
sponsorship deals, and a lot of benefits.
Building yourself
a network of bloggers can help you to know more bloggers and more websites from
where you can get more backlinks.
Ultimately you would aim to become an authority in whatever niche your website and business are working under. To achieve this, you must know who the authoritative figures in the niche are.
Connecting with these people can help you propel your website by knowing what they did right and what they did wrong.
Outreach can help
you in many ways for the overall growth of your website.
But here we are
focussing mainly on how you can leverage that to get backlinks. People usually
try to get backlinks through a guest post, as buying sponsored link postings to
your website would be an extremely high sum to pay (if you are targeting high
authoritative websites).
1. Using Email Search Tools
It may be hard to
believe, but there are services available on the internet, which can help you
find mail addresses. While they might not give you accurate results as to what
you wanted, but they work most of the time.
Some of these popular tools are:
- Hunter.io
- Rocker Reach
- Clearbit Connect
- VoilaNorbet
- Ninja Outreach
You can start
with any of them, but to make your task easy, it is preferred that you go with
this. Your entire job of finding is automated and saves you a lot of trouble to
dig through the Internet (more on that later).
A) Hunter.io
Hunter.io is one
of the most popular tools available on the internet to find people’s email
addresses.
You first have to
sign-up on the website to use their service. The business plan follows a
freemium model; with the free version (titled as a casual user), you get about
100 email searches per month with the paid version (titled as power user) with
no restriction of 100 mail searches.
There are various plans to choose from: starter, growth, pro, and enterprise. Since you probably won’t target more than 100 people at one go, the free version will work good in your case.
The paid versions are usually for the ones who are planning on promoting their services across the mass.
The developers
behind the tool have made the entire using of the service quite simple. Your
search for the domain whose mail address you are trying to obtain.
After you hit enter, you will be presented with a list of email addresses associated with the domain. If you want to be more specific, you can also click on the find someone search bar to get the mail address of the person you are planning to mail.
To make the
process more secure, they provide users with a verification badge across the
fetched mail address. You are also provided with a toggle option to look at where
it found the mail address.
With Hunter.io
you are not limited to finding mail IDs, there are a lot of other useful
features:
- Email finder: Let’s say you came across an employee of a certain company, and the only thing you know about is their name. With Hunter.io, you can easily find their email address. Just hit their name + company’s name in the search bar, and hunter.io will try its best to give you a mail address.
- Domain search: I found this one quite useful. If you know a certain website, you can find all the email addresses present on the web. Not only that, but it will also give you information on that person’s name, phone number, and so on.
- Mail tracker: What if you want to see who has opened your mail and who hasn’t? The mail tracker has got you covered up. It also sends you a notification when somebody has opened the mail you sent.
- Email verifier: What this service does is it looks if your mail will get bounced.
You can also
download the extension available for your Chrome browser to further increase
the functionality of the service.
B) Rocket Reach
What Rocket Reach
does differently is instead of finding email addresses through websites and
domains, it looks for mail addresses through profiles on LinkedIn. It also
explores Crunchbase and AngelList as well.
It similarly
follows a freemium model, the only drawback being: you are limited to five
searches per month. This limitation is quite low and won’t be sufficient for
you as well. Usually, you target ten companies hoping at least 3-4 mail gets
converted into replies.
With Rocket
Reach, you make use of a Chrome extension.
- After you install the extension, you look for the profile of that specific person that you want to target.
- The plugin will have a small icon on the top at the right-hand corner.
- Click on the add button, and it will do its job to find the mail address.
C) Clearbit Connect
Clearbit is one
of the well-known companies in the sector of Business intelligence and offers a
whole set of amazing tools to help you do your business online effectively.
It works similar
to Rocket Reach, using a chrome browser extension.
There are two versions: with the free one offering you about 25 mail searches per month, quite low compared to the hunter.
One of the standout features is that it allows you to find the details of anybody who sends you an email. Using Clearbit extension, you can easily find about the person in detail who is sending you mail for the first time.
Alongside it also provide you links associated with that profile such as LinkedIn profile links.
The plugin is
quite easy to use. Once you install it and connect your Gmail account, you can
search the plugin directly about the company you are targeting. One of the
drawbacks is that it works only with Gmail and outlook.
So if you are
using Yahoo, this might not come in handy for you.
D) VoilaNorbert
One of the
drawbacks of Hunter is that despite being a very powerful tool, it doesn’t
allow you to search for email addresses from companies such as Gmail or Yahoo
mail.
VoileNorbert
overcomes this. It works on the same lines of Hunter; you have to provide the
domain name or by using the person’s name along with domain for more refined
searches.
But its strong point can also be its weak point. If you are looking for Gmail addresses with the person’s name, you are bound to come across emails that have common names only differed by additional alpha-numeric characters.
In that case, you won’t be able to figure out which Gmail is the actual account of the person you are trying to target.
Still, you can
use it along with any other tool on the list. The free version offers you 50
email addresses/month. There are four paid plans in case you want to increase
the volume of searches.
e) Ninja Outreach
Ninja outreach is
one of the well-known companies working under the influence marketing industry.
They offer solutions to connect with other people easily and one of the ways
they facilitate this is through their amazing chrome browser plugin.
It is one of the most powerful tools, offering you features like data mining. Data mining digs through the website to find every possible information crucial in contacting them and knowing about them in detail.
From their personal contact number to domain authority, the plugin digs every possible information relevant to that person.
It also provides you with other crucial information such as finding the demographics of the audience of the website directly. And other essential information such as bounce rate, time spent on the website and so on.
They have a Chrome Extension Ninja Outreach Lite.
The extension follows a freemium model. With the paid version offering you features like contact form auto-fill. Usually, you need to contact people through the contact-us page of the website. This extension has all the template and data loaded in it, so you can directly fill contact forms without any hassle.
2. Subscribe to Email List
If you are not
getting any leads from the first step, one way to start your campaign to search
the email address to subscribe to the email list.
The websites you
are targeting will usually be high-authority websites. And with every
high-authority website, they will have their mailing list to connect with users
base effectively.
You can leverage
this opportunity to get some leads on the mail address.
Once you start getting emails from that specific website, you can note down the mail address from where they are mailing. Usually, it would be a very generic one, such as [email protected] or something on those lines.
Companies rarely would send outgoing mails in the form of newsletters through private mail addresses.
But if you have
the luck in your favor, you might get one. Or even if you don’t get one, mails
from the company often leave the person to contact.
This way often
requires a stroke of luck and a bit of patience but is an effective way to find
nonetheless.
3. Reach Out on Social Media
If the above
method felt indirect and time-consuming, how about directly contacting the
person?
There are various
social networking websites, from LinkedIn to Twitter to Facebook. If you don’t
want to take the long road to get the email address, you can leave them a text.
Although there’s a factor of luck here, without sending them friend requests (on Facebook) if you text them, they might or might not like to reply to unsolicited messages.
The same goes for platforms such as LinkedIn. For twitter, you can directly tweet to them, but the same goes for it; it is up to them whether they want to reply back or not.
With websites
like LinkedIn, you can connect your way to the target person through mutual
connections, although that will be time-consuming. But in the end, you will
have a good connection with people who can help you.
You can also try
contacting them unconventionally through websites like Instagram and Quora.
Although there’s no guarantee of whether this would work, if it works, it will
help you build some solid relationships.
4. Search “@domainname.com” in DuckDuckGo
You can also
leverage the power of search engines to help you find email addresses.
For example, you can search @xyz.com, where Xyz is the name of the domain you are targeting. What it does is that it will scan for mail addresses all over the web ending in @xyz.com
Suppose an
employee Sam, is working in xyz. His mail address would be [email protected]. Now sam
must have posted his company mail address on various places over the web as a
part of his own and company’s outreach.
With the help of the search engine, you can easily get all the employees who have a @xyz.com mailing address. This will give you a huge list of email addresses to work with.
There are also
other tweaks to find more about the places where you can get there mail
addresses, some of these are:
- site: xyz.com contact;
- site: xyz.com about us;
- site: xyz.com team.
What this query looks for is pages in Xyz website titled contact and so on. These can give you a headstart to get addresses. (Replace Xyz with the company’s name you are trying to find).
Also, you can use
the following queries:
- Target_Name email;
- Target_Name contact;
- “First_Name Last_name” email.
These queries
will help you target the person specifically.
5. Use ‘Contact Us’ on the website
Sometimes small
to medium-sized companies usually post mail addresses of the important people
related to the website on it. As they want to increase their size, it involves
connecting with people more and more. One way to achieve this is for users to
be able to communicate with the main guy running the website.
Usually, these
websites have a team page. This page
lists all the important people and might include the person you are aiming to
target.
If they don’t
have any team page on the website, you can also try the contact us page. These
emails are usually directed to a centralized location and are vetted to
appropriate departments.
So you can mail
them with your query about backlink, and whoever is handling the inbox to mail
address can redirect to the right person.
6. Just Guess It
This is the most
unconventional method present on this list.
If you have
noticed carefully, email addresses follow a general format, and there are
variations of it.
Companies usually
follow these mail addressing formats for various reasons, but the primary
reason being it is easy to remember. People in the same company might have to
mail each other, and to make it a convenient job, the company keeps it in some
conventional manner.
They also do the
same for maintaining a degree of formality and standard among the addresses.
If you manage to
get hold of any on the mail address of the employee working in the company and
you know the name of the person you are thinking to target, you can use the
formatting style of the employee to predict it.
To check whether
the mail address is valid or not, you can use a service like e-mail
checker, which will come
handy to you if you are trying to guess it. Another superb way is to use a tool
like Email Permutator.
It takes in input
the user’s name, surname, and the domain you are targeting. This website will
then give you a list of different mail addresses you can check individually,
whether they exist or not.
This method is a
bit risky, though. There are mail addresses which are not made public on the
web for some reason. Using both of the above tools, you can get a list of mail
addresses that shouldn’t be publicly accessed. This access is illegal in
several countries.
7. Using Twitter’s Advanced Search
Most of the
people are on Twitter these days. Twitter can act as a great source of
engagement with like-minded people and build new connections.
People even drop
their mail addresses in the form of tweets so that relevant people can
communicate with them. Suppose our employee Sam tweeted long back that he
requires graphic designers, and he wants to see if he knows anybody in his
circle who is or who knows a graphic designer.
Sam will then
tweet out that if anybody knows such a person, then he/she can communicate with
me at this email address.
But usually,
people refrain from using standard email formats like name@company_name.com.
This is to prevent them from bots and to get their inbox spammed with
unsolicited mails (quite the irony!). So they usually prefer to go with
something like this:
Name “at” company_name “dot” com
This way, stay
clear of the bots.
But you can
leverage this understanding and do a reverse search with the help of Twitter’s advanced
search feature.
Once you reach
the advanced search feature, one section will be provided for putting in a
phrase and keywords and another which asks for people. You would only require
these two, as the other two:time and places rarely come handy.
You can type in
your keywords like email and put the target’s Twitter handle. It will process
for a while and give you a list of tweets containing the mail addresses.
8. Check the Official Page on Facebook
Almost all the
companies and websites want to have a social media presence by building their
company’s social media pages. They aim to connect with people more closely
through social networking websites.
Ubiquitously
almost all the websites prefer having a Facebook presence as well.
So what if you
are not able to reach that specific person on Facebook? You can try dropping a message on their Facebook
page. Usually, these websites are run by social media managers, and you might
get a reply from their side.
It might be
negative, but what’s the harm in trying? There is a good chance that they will
give you the email address as a matter of redirecting the queries, which is
what their job is. They can also redirect you to other people who can give you
a lead.
Conclusion
So these are the
ways you can find somebody’s email address for backlink outreach.
Although you can
text them directly over social media channels, the chances of you getting a
reply are less if you are not connected with them in any way. Also, it is
better to keep things related to the website and backlinking on the formal side
of things.
If luck is with
you, you might get the mail address of the targeted person with a tool like
Hunter, and you wouldn’t have to go down. Although almost all the steps, even
if they give you a working mail address, it would be ultimately to luck that
they will reply you back.
But if one of
these techniques doesn’t work for you, you can often employ a mix of different
strategies mentioned in the list to get your job done.