Link outreach is boring, time consuming, and it’s a lot like being a hitter in baseball; even those who are the best at it are going to fail more often than they succeed.
I have a small trick for you that can help you to double or even triple your success rate. It’s still time consuming. It’s still going to take some effort. However, it can certainly help you see some additional successes.
This is something I have been doing for several years now. Many of you may know that I have been big into building private networks going back to 2006. I even built and sold a course on how to do it.
Well, one of the most popular ways to acquire domains for a network is by scavenging through domain auctions. This can provide you an opportunity for outreach too.
You can use whatever method you want for searching for domains that are up for auction. I like SpamZilla. When you find a domain that is in your niche or a closely related niche, here is what you do.
First, take a screenshot of the auction page. We’ll come back to that later.
Second, throw the domain into Semrush or your favorite tool for checking links.
Now take the export and sort the links by anchor text. You can toss all the generic anchors like click here, website, learn more, etc. Most of those are going to be things like directories and profiles. We don’t want those. What I am looking for here is anchors that are related to keywords I target. Either exact match or partial match.
Do you see where this is going yet?
These sites are sites that were already willing to give out a link at some point to the site that is up for auction, whether they did so for free or were compensated for it.
What you want to do is to reach out to these sites and mention the link they have on their site, include the exact URL, and inform them that the site they are linking to no longer exists. This is where the screenshot can come in handy. Sometimes sites up for auction are still accessible. Sometimes they are completely down.
If the site is still up, they may think you are lying, which is why you can include the auction screenshot.
Let them know this site has already come down or will be coming down soon, but you have a similar page to the one they are already linking to. All they need to do is update the link to avoid linking out to a 404 page.
Just like with traditional outreach, sometimes they will want to be paid for the link. The advantage of this method is that I have found the response rate to be generally higher because it is a more unique pitch than the typical emails these site owners are getting.
The tricky thing is finding appropriate domains in auctions, which you won’t always find.
