Who's the “Best” Person to Pitch for a Backlink? - 3.2. Link Building Course

Hey, it's Sam Oh and welcome to the second lesson in the vetting module. In this lesson, we're going to talk about who you should contact with your link outreach pitches. Now, generally speaking, you'll want to contact one of these four people. The author, editor, marketing or content marketing manager, or a webmaster. And if you can't find contacts for any of these people, a last resort may be to reach out to a generic email like Now, in order to understand who you should contact, you need to consider these two things. Number one, the goal you're trying to achieve. And number two, the size of the company. Let's talk about how goals impact your contact first. Let's say you're pitching a guest post. Your goal is to have someone within a company give you the okay to publish your content there. Now, you wouldn't contact an author from the blog or a webmaster because they're not going to be the decision makers when it comes to having guest writers. You'll probably want to contact the editor. Now, the size of the company can also play an impact on who you contact. Let's continue running with the guest posting example. Assuming you wanted to guest post for Ahrefs' blog, contacting our editor wouldn't be effective. At the time of making this video, we have a team of seven in-house writers. And our editor's job is to make sure that our posts flow, are grammatically sound, and look perfect. You would need to contact the head of content because he's the person who would give you the yay or nay on a guest posting opportunity. Alright, let's talk about requesting edits to an existing post. Contacting the author would be perfectly reasonable because they're the ones who wrote the content and would know it best. Contacting the editor would also make sense because they have the power to link and if given a good enough reason, they might do it. Now, for one of my recent link building campaigns, where the goal was to get links in existing posts, I kept track of the titles of people who we sent pitches to and our link acquisition rates. So, 7.56% of authors linked to us. 7.55% of editors linked to us. Surprisingly, 4% of generic emails linked to us, mostly small companies. And just 1.64% of other titles like Content Marketing Manager or Webmaster linked to us. Bottom line, who you contact matters. You need to contact people who can actually add your link to their page. If they don't have the power to do it, then your outreach pitch will be more or less pointless. Now, identifying who to contact is pretty quick and easy. What's arguably the most time-consuming part of the entire link building process is finding these people's emails. And to make matters worse, you don't even know whether these campaigns are going to convert to a good number of links. But there's a way you can find emails quickly and test your campaigns without investing a ton of time into them. It's called a Blitz List. And that's what we're talking about in the next lesson. I'll see you there.