Transcript
Joe Troyer: So Frankie’s asking about sponsored posts and guest posts, pitching to mommy bloggers. I can just share some stats with you if I can figure out my login, if that would be helpful. Then we can kind of walk through there and I can share what’s working now there. So guys, for me, cold email outreach is is a process, right? Whether you’re pitching mommy blogs or any other blogs for sponsored links or guest posts, or whether you’re using it to prospect in your business. Cold email outreach is a process for me that I set up and then I let go. Like I run the process very intuitively, and I am crazy, I’m a stickler with it in the short term. All right, I got in. But then long term, I don’t continue to mess with it, right? Like we just run the sequence and it’s an automated process for me once we figure that out.
Joe Troyer: So happy to share with you guys kind of what’s working, but me not having the login for a cold email platform, frankly, is pretty normal, so to speak. Because we set it up, we get it working, and then like our job as an entrepreneur is to then walk away from it. So I’ll share with you guys what’s working now. All right, give me a one in the chat, if you would, if you guys can see my screen now, please.
Joe Troyer: All right, great. So we are using QuickMail, and have always used QuickMail for our outbound emails, for guest posts, and sponsored posts. It’s the system that my team uses, all the sequences and contacts and all our prospects are in there. So we have played with Prospect Rocket with new campaigns and new things that we’re setting up. And I do like Prospect Rocket because of the ability to do so much more than just cold email outreach. There’s a lot of like CRM type of capabilities and things like that, but you don’t really need those when you’re just pitching guest posts or sponsored posts. So that’s why I’ve left, those are the scenarios or the reasons why I’ve left everything running inside of QuickMail. Just to answer that, ’cause I know I’ll get that.
Joe Troyer: So you can see here kind of some overall stats. You can see outbound emails, how many outbound we sent, how many first touches, how many follow-ups, how many opens, how many clicks, how many replies. So there’s just kind of an overview. But really what we’re looking for is the nuts and bolts of the sequence. So guys, we run a course teaching this entire process from A to Z, from how do you prospect people that will accept the pitch to how do you clean that list, how do you filter that list, what are the emails that we should use when people respond? How do you actually get them to say yes? And then how do you get content written? Who are the vendors that you use? All to get back links for guest posts and sponsored posts for ourselves and for clients. And so I’m going to do you guys a big sell [inaudible] today, and I’m going to share with you guys a bunch of this process. And the reason why is because you guys asked for it, right? No ulterior motive.
Joe Troyer: So you can see here some some campaigns. This is the primary campaign, and this is called general sponsored posts. So you guys can see that there’s three steps in the sequence list. There’s 1,405 people that have been assigned to the sequence. You can see out of that, 74% have opened, 9% have clicked, 31% have replied, and I have a 6% bounce. Just looking up a stat, like I would hope my bounce rate would be under six, or really ideally under 5%. A thing that surprises a lot of people when they look at my cold email campaigns is the open rate, right? So you can see 74% of people that have been on this sequence have opened my emails. And then you can see that 74% have opened, right? Which is 1,000 people on this campaign. 437 have replied. So guys, this campaign is singlehandedly, this one sequence is singlehandedly responsible for 437 people that I’ve pitched a guest post to responding back.
Joe Troyer: So I need you guys to understand, that’s crazy. If I’m able to turn half of those responses into opportunities for my customers or for myself to do guest posts on, having 200 sites, 200 blocks for us to post content to is ridiculous. And folks, at the end of the day, you can be in almost any vertical and crush it with 200 root domains. Does that make sense to everybody? Let me bring up the chat here real quick. I didn’t realize how zoomed in I was on my face. Sorry. That’s sort of like “Hey.” I want to see your guys’ comments here. Yeah, crazy open rate. 70% versus 20%. Yeah, my face was really, really huge. Brett says “Just got here, is there a replay?” Brett, there’s a replay every Thursday on the YouTube channel. The replay goes out from the ones [inaudible 00:05:47].
Joe Troyer: Frankie says “Can you share the link to the program you have for sale?” So Frankie, it’s not like a program that’s always open. We release it. It’s been released, I think, only twice ever, or maybe even once ever. We have kind of a backdoor [inaudible 00:00:06:07] give you one in though, we can teach you how to do this stuff. Price is roughly $1,000, I think, $997 or $999, and we teach you basically our process from A to Z to get guest posts and sponsored posts. At the end of the day, I believe that guest posts and sponsored posts are the only way to truly scale link building in today’s white hat type of environment, white to gray hat environment. I think it’s really the only way to scale it. Unless you’ve got clients with SEO that have huge budgets, it’s really hard to spend money on what a lot of SEOs would call linkable assets like resource pages or really long pieces of content.
Joe Troyer: Really useful statistics and stuff like that is hard. And frankly I don’t think that it makes sense with the budget to do that in most cases, for like a “local business” or small business. When it comes to content marketing for link building, I think that would be the only alternative. And in most cases I think that it just doesn’t make sense cost-wise. Does that make sense to people? Give me a nod in the chat. It’s just too hard, right? Like I can get guest posts and sponsored posts for all in, anywhere from $50 to $100 a link for a DA 30+, let’s call it, links. So super high quality, and you don’t need that many for a local business for them to really stand out and absolutely dominate their competition in terms of linking metrics.
Joe Troyer: So this is the campaign. As you guys can see here, there’s some other campaigns in here. I started this one, little bit of a different angle, I believe. I forget exactly how this one was, but it didn’t beat the original. So I did a copy of it, and you can see 433 people we put in, open rate was a little bit less, click rate was a little bit less, reply rate was 5% less. Bounce rate was like the same, and so I stopped running this one. I think this was just like a tutorial that I was doing with the first, this one. Let’s see. Well, this campaign was really interesting, so I can walk you guys through this campaign. Let’s first, though, run through this general sponsored post sequence. So I’m going to walk you guys through with the content in here.
Joe Troyer: Please understand, I’m giving you guys everything. This is the money, this is what one of the big things I teach inside the course, I’m not holding anything back. So the subject line is “advertising options,” and the first one, “can we collaborate?” On the second one, or on the second variation, let’s see, the second step, previous subject line, RE previous subject line. Same for the other one that I’m split testing here. And then the third step, sponsored posts on your site we tested, and RE previous subject. So we’ll walk through the variations here.
Joe Troyer: So step number one, just in terms of comparison, you can see 61% open on both. 7% click on this one, 6% on this one. And reply rate, 20% on this one, 24% on this one. So “can we collaborate?” actually did better than “advertising options.” Open rate was the same. Clickthrough rate was was a little better on this one, but we got a much higher reply rate on the other. So I would say this one was the winner. So advertising, well let’s see, 12% reply rate, 15% reply rate. I mean, they’re close. We definitely want more replies than link clicks, though. So I would say that this step two variation is actually the winner.
Joe Troyer: So “can we collaborate?” And guys, this is a very wide one. I’ll pull this open so that you guys can see exactly what this says as well. So subject line is “can we collaborate?” So it says, prospect first name, I wanted to reach out and see what advertising options you have on your site. Dot, dot, dot, we represent 100+ clients in our agency and are always looking for quality bloggers to partner with for guest posts or sponsored posts. We’d love to figure out how we can work with you. Thanks for your time, Joe Troyer, founder of, and then we link Digital Triggers. Simple email, yes? I am very simple.
Joe Troyer: All right, so then the follow-up, let’s see what’s working best. So RE previous subject I used on both of them, so I wonder if I’m even split testing anything in here. Let’s see, reply rate 9%, 10%. Yeah, I mean, the emails are the same then in the second one. So I’ll just show you what this looks like. So again, RE previous subject is the subject line. So, I hope this email finds you well. I sent you an email a few days ago. I was just curious what advertising options you have on your site. We’re looking for guest posts or sponsored posts. That’s it. Then my email signature, I saw my email signature too. I don’t know if you guys caught it, I put in Web One Syndication and Digital Triggers like two companies. Know that that was not done on purpose. The signature should should obviously be the same throughout, right? I mess shit up, I’m not perfect, but I get things into action very quickly, right?
Joe Troyer: So third step, we can see here 55% open rate on this top one. My reply rate, 13% versus 12%, so this is the one that’s winning, right? “Sponsored posts on your site” is working the best. So we can take a look at this. So again, “sponsored posts on your site” is the email subject line, and it says, sorry for the persistent follow up, I need to get a sponsored posts and guest posts slated in the calendar for our client in the next three days. Do you accept guest posts or sponsored posts? Appreciate your help, hoping we can work together. That’s quite literally it.
Joe Troyer: So again, this brought in 437 responses. So let’s see, does that help, Frankie? And anybody else too, obviously, if you have questions on the sequence, don’t hesitate to ask. Frankie says yes. All right, so one little tip here, Frankie, too, that’s been working. I offer to sponsor people’s posts because then the binoculars or the, I don’t know, the angle changes when I offer to pay. Now people aren’t so critical about the content that we write, and folks like the contents okay, but it’s not great. So when I pay it, when I offer to sponsor it I get a whole lot more people saying yes, number one, right? Then number two is also that they aren’t then as picky with the content that I write. So that’s key.
Joe Troyer: One thing, though, that’s been working on for us lately, one little tip that we’ve been playing with, and it’s a trick that I can’t really take credit for, it’s a tip that I got from a friend of mine that I was interviewing that’s going to be on that podcast release here soon, if you haven’t seen it already. And he shared one little nugget, and that was, when people say yes for a sponsored post and then they give you the price, just respond back and say “Hey, actually, my client would actually fit in this blog post that you already wrote,” just give them a URL to one of their existing blogposts, and then say “How much would it cost just to put in a link to them on this post?” And give them the link and give them the anchor text.
Joe Troyer: And so what you’ve done is, now you don’t have to write the content or you don’t have to pay to outsource the content. You don’t have to pay an editor to review the content, and you also don’t have to wait for that long timeline of writing the content, then sending it to the blogger, whether it’s a mommy blog or any type of blog, and then they have to go manually put it in that post, import all the images, do all the formatting, put in your links. They can skip 90% of that. That is huge.
Joe Troyer: Yeah, microscope was the word that I couldn’t think of. Blonde moment there, guys. I am blonde. So that’s a little tweak and it’s something that we are playing with for sure. For us lately, we’ve been focused a lot on content and on that side of things and trying to get our costs down on the content. We used to use a vendor that would charge us $25 for a piece of content that we’d use for these guest posts and sponsored posts. And it was great, right, because the cost was high, but they had really good editors. And I’d just say “Here’s the blog that we’re doing the piece of content on, here’s the idea or the topic that we pitched them that they said yes to.” And they would figure out the rest of the details, like they would write the piece. And that was great, but that’s a big significant piece of the budget, you know, $25.
Joe Troyer: So now we have people writing the content, and we are staying on top of them. We found writers that we’re outsourcing to, and we have to kind of become the editor now. And the content’s a lot cheaper, it’s like $5 an article. But then we have to edit it as well. So let’s say that the cost is $10, even with editing included. So that’s great. And I thought that that was a huge win, right? Going from 25 to 10, but the bigger win is just getting them to update a blogpost on their site. And we’re able to get that link placed a lot faster. And then we don’t have any costs for writing content.
Joe Troyer: Frankie says “I found 400 mommy blogs with emails. Is that enough to get started?” Yeah, man. I mean, look at my stats, right? Like you have them. All right, so 1,034 opens. So we dumped 1,405 prospects in here, we had 1,000 open, and we had 437 replies. So what I’d look at if I were you, is copy my sequence, right? Don’t reinvent the wheel. And you should have roughly, this translates into a third, right? A third to a quarter of your prospects reply. So if you’ve got 400 mommy blogs, you should get 100 of those to get you a response. And out of that you should be able to negotiate, you know, 75 of them to a deal that that’s good for you and that’s good for them. Awesome, man. Hopefully that helps, brother.
Joe Troyer: Let’s see, yes. Just the yes was huge. Okay, great. “He must have used ScrapeBox to search for the term mommy blog and related titles.” So we don’t use ScrapeBox any more. You can definitely use ScrapeBox. There’s all kinds of tools out there that you guys can use. We developed something that’s a little proprietary to us that we have that we haven’t ever really released besides beta for people inside the backlink outreach master class program. But yeah, ScrapeBox would work, any tools like that where you can put in, you want to be able to put in your search phrases, that are looking for guest posts and sponsored posts and footprints, so to speak, for that.
Joe Troyer: And then also add, in addition to that, keyword phrases that would identify specifically the type of niches that you’re going after. And for me, it’s really about mommy blogs. Cool. Yeah, so Frankie says he hired somebody to do the scraping for him. Yeah, so good stuff. You’re very welcome, brother. Get that up and running, let me know how it goes. All right, all right, all right. Good stuff. Frankie says he pays $4.50 for 500 words. Yeah, that works. And yeah, I’m curious, Frankie, does that cover somebody else editing it, or is that separate? All right, all right. What’s up, John Gill? Good to see you. Yeah, separate. Okay.
