Link Building Case Study: Results of 515 Outreach Emails [Ep. 2]

In part 2 of our 3-part series, you’ll learn the exact link building process we used to build backlinks to our stats page.

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Additional Link Building Resources

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If you’re new to this series, our first video was about strategically building a statistics page that would generate links. And in this video, we’ll show you how we built links to that page.

In order to isolate backlinks from our email outreach efforts, we didn’t promote the post to our existing audience. On top of that, we hid it from our blog index and category pages, RSS feeds, and we even noindexed the page so it couldn’t be discovered in search.

That simply means that the post was practically invisible unless we sent you an outreach email.

And you’ll learn what our results are in the video.

So, how did we execute the campaign? You’ll learn exactly what and how we did in the video, but here’s a brief overview:
► Get a list of link prospects
► Look for reasons why people were linking to the competing stats pages
► Do a clean up of our prospects list
► Remove prospects based on link attributes and the page’s SEO metrics.
► Write our outreach template and create personalization fields for each contact.

We also got a few takeaways from our link building process, and we share those takeaways in the video too.

Timestamps:

0:00 Intro
2:30 Assessing the quality of the links
4:42 Get a list of link prospects
5:13 Look for reasons why people are linking
7:30 Do a clean up of a prospects list and automate
10:36 Write an outreach template and create personalization fields for the contacts
13:03 Revising the results of the outreach campaign
15:23 Key takeaways and shortcomings

#linkbuildingcasestudy #linkbuilding #outreach

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[ArtemMinayev]

Hey Sam, great case study. But, I think you need to mention that Ahrefs is well known in the SEO world and reaching out as an Ahrefs related to SEO stats gave you a better results. It would be good to see a case study of the same campaign from unknown website/brand. With proper manual Outreach campaign we’ve seen success rates as high as 10% but it takes time and we did follow ups. Thanks for sharing.

[scottnailon]

The only problem here is that AHREFS is a globally recognised brand - which means people will be more willing to help.

[mcqexplorer]

As I finished watching a full 18 min video, I finally understand your quote on "this link building is a bit more advanced than any other one" and I couldn't agree more. I found ms excel more complicated than any other part of the video and suggest making a more in-depth video on that specific sector. And as always thanks for your videos, I can feel your hard work and consistency from the number of retakes made in this video. !!

[vaibhavvidhole]

thanks a lot sam,
as a digital marketing fresher i have learned new things which I never know until this video.
thanks again sam.
you are adding values to our professional life.

[JustinPincar]

Sam - been watching every one of your videos and they're all great! We talked with a ton of SEO agencies and had pretty bad experiences, so finally decided to bite the bullet and invest time in learning it ourselves. Your videos are approachable and easy to follow, and even though we're only a couple of weeks in, we're already seeing significant growth in organic traffic. Really appreciate your efforts Sam (and the rest of the Ahrefs team), and eagerly awaiting the final part in this series.

[WarMonkeyPlays]

Thank you so much for this. I've anticipated that the industry average CVR on link outreach was only 5% at best, and considering that you guys put out top notch content, I think that holds water. A 5% CVR has been my experience with _successful_ campaigns.

[MrAAMNNITAllahabad]

Loved the way you took the stand against the paying for links... (Lord bless that guy who thinks 1Link = only $20)

[gulzaarfpv]

Hey Sam,

Great idea for segmenting! Definitely worth looking into.

One thing I feel you missed out on was that an outreach email from a brand as well known as Ahrefs carries a lot more weight than an outreach email from Slow Joe Crows Cafe :)

[farrisfahad]

I have a request for a case study that will help a lot of us understand SEO much better. Why don't you build 3 new sites. One great, one good, and one okay. I know that it might require a lot of work but the research results great.

[YoyomaniaCZ]

Thank you for showing the automated process - mainly the sheet-work :D. Hunter API - whaaaat? Never heard of it.

[ginlog]

Try doing this case study with a brand new domain and in a different niche. Then this will be worth something. Now... not so much.

[XplorersofFun]

Sam, please tell me how you made the "custom tool" to scrape author names?

[imlakdawala]

I had sent 100 emails for the backlink of my Shopify statistics article to who contains Shopify in their titles.

I had used Ahrefs content explorer to find bloggers who talks about Shopify.

Result: 2 blogger added our link without asking anything in return.

Most of the bloggers asked us link exchange and money.

But since our domain DR (74 of HostingPill) and the bloggers DR are low (less than 50) so we have asked them cross link exchange with our other website, in order to avoid direct link exchange.

They didn't reply except 1 blogger.

However, I had also ran Facebook ad of our content marketing stats article in the last year.

That resulted 1 backlink to the article. This campaign I had run for very short time and with lower budget so not so many reach I was able to bring to my campaign.

Another thing, if your statistics article is ranked in Google then you will get natural backlink without reach out or any effort.

This case I have seen with my another site (topvpn.review's) cybersecurity statistics article.

BTW, thanks for sharing this case study with us. Waiting for part 3 :)

[ShoaibSanto]

Thank You So Much Sam for Your Next Case Study Video

[anshulrana]

Anyone would link to ahref.. what about the small website.. it is tough I think..

[dia-elsayed]

Please dear show how to create backlinks do a practical short video and also list up the best websites for backlinks

[michaelmurray]

Brilliant video. Can you suggest other examples of other types of content that are really good for gaining links? Apart from statistic articles

[Ahsan_Laskar]

Hey Sam, What is your expertise Link Building, Keyword Research, On-Page SEO or Techical SEO ?

[BoltChampion]

Thanks for cool and amazing tips sir. Please make more valuable videos belonging to Backlinks. 🙏🙏

[claudeashley]

Which Software do you use for sending those outreach pitches?