Whether it is online business or exhibiting your hobby or information over the internet and reach a level of success in your venture of being a web entrepreneur begins with making connections with the professional of your own information domain.
Since every web campaign is initiated by a human, so in order to make connections with the people and with their respective sites is done by the means of communication.
Communication in this era is done mostly with the help of E-mails since it is a reliable and efficient communication means of this century. Emails are mostly used to make connections with the people when we require to reach out to others for our website/blog in order to promote it. This email is specifically known as an Outreach Email.
An outreach mail is sent:
Outreach emails are the best way to make good quality backlinks for your website or blog. Writing effective outreach emails requires some key skills which actually make the work quite easier.
Some of the skills are
These qualities are needed to persuade the recipient of the mail to act upon your will. These are the skills which you require to make your work easy.
But if we look at this topic very precisely, it is not only about the skills required to write an effective outreach mail or how to develop those, rather it is concentrated on actually writing of the mail and the attributes that your mail should hold in order to have a maximum probability of getting your task accomplished.
The important points which when incorporated properly in your mail, can increase the probability of getting the outreach successful. These points are:-
1. Clear Subject
The first and the most important of all the points is to have a perfect email subject lines. Since it is the first thing that becomes visible is the subject of the mail, which either makes the recipient read the mail or leave it as it is.
A clear subject in the mail with the proposed action which you intend the recipient to do after reading the mail. This statement is also called CTA(Call to Act). You can also hire freelance content writer from sites like Upwork to help you write clear CTAs.
2. Proper Email ID
The second and the other most important thing is to have a proper email ID. Since spamming mailboxes is a serious issue of the date, and most of the people can identify spam by looking at the sender’s mail ID.
So it is very important to have proper mail ID so that all your hard work does not go to trash.
3. Message Clarity
The message that the body of the mail holds is then the thing which needs a lot more patience than one thinks. This is the main part of the mail, which will either convince the recipient to your CTA, or your mail and proposal will be left as it is, as the emails of other unconvincing personalities.
The message body should be precise, dynamic, compact yet enough descriptive to include all the important aspects of your outreach and convince the recipient for the task. The body of the article should be dynamic in order to psychologically convince without letting him know, and compact because no one is going to pay so much of his valuable time for an email from an unknown sender.
4. Help Others
Help the person identify a mistake or a bug in his website. With your help, he will be able to improve his website. Moreover, he will be overwhelmed to accept your request, knowing that you are the person who identified the error and helped him to rectify it.
I am sure that he will stay by your side at the time of your need. Similarly, remember to stay at his side when he needs your help. This way both of you will benefit from each other.
5. Call to Action
A proper and clear call to action or CTA should be mentioned and should be the primary objective of the mail. A call to action is the primary objective of the mail and should come out clearly as nobody is interested in doing long talks on email with unknown business owners. The only thing they are concerned about is pure business and work.
6. Reminder CTA
The second CTA is nothing but a formal second request which actually provides the reader to reconsider your outreach, which is a very helpful tip to get positive responses.
7. Signature
The last but not the least important, Signature of your firm/yourself. A signature does not mean you have to provide your initials at the end of the mail, but a nice formal sentence of gratitude at the end with your name. This is the thing which will stay in the mind of the recipient and this potentially helps you at your other outreach. Because the cycle doesn’t end here.
E-mail writing is an important task of our century and is a talent which comes over time and practice. Emails are widely used since the discovery of the Internet. The structural interface exposed to the user of the Email has not changed since then. The very reason for this is, it is sufficient for every sort of written communication. With this I mean, whether it is casual chat or business communication needs.
But unfortunately, many people commit mistakes while writing emails and unknowingly they miss the chance of getting a positive response.
Here in this blog, we would also be targeting the mistakes that people make while writing business emails. Because frankly speaking, a casual email with an attachment to an old friend does not require anything more than a subject to identify the specific mail among the pile of emails. But it is not so with the business mails.
Getting back to the topic, let us begin with the mistakes and their rectifications.
1. Forgetting to Greet/Close
The first mistake that most of us do, starts with the beginning of the body of the email and ends with the end of the email. This is Greeting in the mail and closing of the mail.
These two things are very important as it tells about who is the email written to and who is writing the email. This is strictly advised to be implemented.
This mistake makes your email sound weird and inappropriate. The greeting of the email can be, for example, Hi/Hello/Dear John Doe. This would be appropriate if the email is not too heavy, or if it is sent to a person of a similar hierarchy as the sender. Or if of a higher hierarchy then it can be, for example, Respected John Doe.
Basically, the greeting of the mail should be according to the relationship of the sender with the recipient of the email.
Now, for closing, you can use phrases like “Thank You” or “Warm Regards” followed with your name and designation.
2. Forgetting to mention the subject
This mistake is disastrous if you do it because this shows that you are lenient and irresponsible. Writing the subject to an email is like writing the topic to an article.
A subject is a small phrase or sentence that is sufficient for justifying the purpose of the email. It is very important because according to that only, any email user prioritize to read their emails on their respective mailboxes. So it is a very bad practice to send emails without an appropriate and self-sustained subject. Either you can make a habit of writing the subject of the email first and then think of the actual email body or remember to definitely write it at the end but before sending the mail.
3. Punctuations and super-long sentences
Generally, people write super long sentences without proper use of punctuations. This results in a message, which has an unclear meaning and is hard to understand. This situation can let make the purpose of your email remain undone or would be unsuccessful.
It is a good practice to use small clear and crisp sentences, with proper use of punctuations. This would definitely be appreciated while at the same time getting the purpose of the email fulfilled at earliest.
4. Not Reviewing
Some fast-paced people are so much in a hurry that they forget to review the email for any errors in typing or grammar or missing compulsory fields like the subject of the email. This can create an impression of an irresponsible professional which is never good when talked about business.
Reviewing your email’s body twice out loud, you can also check the tone of the email. This will help you convince the other person or inform him/her about the specific issue.
5. Forwarding Without Personalizing
When we talk about digital business over the web. It takes a lot of use of email templates so as to make use of time and keep your business working. When talking about emails to subscribers or newsletters, generally we forget to personalize the email and sent the same email to everyone. This can decrease your merit points that a client or subscriber will have for your business.
Just like personalized gifts, personalized emails are also very dear to everyone’s heart. So it is a good practice to write personalized emails to clients. This will help your organization to earn more trust of clients and eventually make it grow.
Apart from this, a similar mistake is to forward old emails to new clients for the same issue without personalizing. These un-personalized and forwarded emails are seriously not admired by anyone unless it is asked for.
By just paying a little more attention to these small things, anyone can improve his/her email writing skill and build up their business in order to work with ease and efficiency.
And yes, there is one more bonus tip for the respected readers, which is “Not to use an unclear abbreviation or emojis”. Using full forms are really appreciated and emojis are totally prohibited in business emails.
Outreach prospects when chosen correctly, becomes a high-quality outreach which can earn you good backlinks and help better your blog’s/site’s rating.
You can find your outreach prospects from:
1. specific domains
The best outreach prospects reside with the topic of your article. Find people who constantly write these related topics. This is because, if people of the same niche are linking to your article, it improves your ranking. You can find them on the top results of the search engines.
It just takes 10-20 related keyword searches, to find a high-quality outreach prospect.
2. Previous Outreaches
People and sites who have previously liked your work are also good prospects. They are comparatively easier to convince as you’ve previously done work with each other.
This shows the trust in your domain. This shows that the quality of your article is good and of great value, as people do link to you regularly.
Previously linked people, if the link you regularly, build your article’s trust among new readers. This helps you to be relevant in Google searches.
3. Social Media and Query Answering sites
The outreach prospects that instantly show results are on social media sites like Facebook or Twitter and query answering sites like Quora. These platforms are excellent outreach prospects.
Find people, pages, handles that match your needs according to the keyword planning and search matches. Or you can also start a discussion with a related keyword or even your article. You will definitely start getting likes and comments.
4. Paid Promotion
Not a single business survives without being promoted among its prospective users.
If we open a business or a website or a blog and wait for viewers to come, like a purchase the product or service provided by us, then we are just daydreaming. Because it will never happen.
We have to make sincere efforts to bring our website in front of our viewers and persuade them to buy.
In the same way, we have to promote our content. In my previous blog “How to understand Searcher’s Intent and write self-promoting content”, I have explained how to promote your content for free.
Sometimes it is not enough. We have to go for paid promotion also. So today I will tell you how you can promote your content using the paid channels available on the internet.
I hope you all must have read a lot about the common formats that are used in paid advertising like Facebook banner advertisements, paid products placement, sponsorship deals, etc.
But I think content marketers should also use more strategic and authentic means of getting their best content in front of viewers and drive them to take action.
Today I will explain some more paid promotion opportunities. Content Marketers can take advantage of these techniques while promoting their contents.
5. Native Advertising
It is a video streaming, pay to play technique that allows brands to display their content in the form of video. These videos are shown on some other site, where a reader is already reading content similar to the topic.
Native advertisements allow your business to place your content in front of new audiences. These people might be interested but didn’t know about your website.
You should select the content and the sites where you place it very carefully. Then only you will benefit the most from the native advertising’s traffic boosting capability.
Hence the content promoted through this technique will be positioned as useful and relevant information. This will also make it less prone to ad blockers and banner blindness. This content will be more likely to be trusted.
Remember to be transparent by labeling your content to be sponsored content. So that people don’t accuse your brand of promoting fake news.
6. Paid Search
How many times you have gone to the second page of the Google search result? I am sure “NEVER”. According to Hubspot 75% of viewers never scroll past the first page of Google results.
Hence your website will never be visited if it appears on the second page or beyond that. So the prime motive of any digital marketer is to bring the website to the first page of the Google search result. Paid search helps in doing this.
The paid content gets jumped to the top of the SERP and also includes a tag which tells others that it is a paid content.
These ads run on a pay-per-click (PPC) basis. Content marketers use an auction-based system of Google AdWords to determine when and how often your ad should be displayed along with the keywords you target for.
Through AdWords, Content Marketers can choose a campaign type or create their own ads or call – to- action buttons or the landing page URLs. They can even select keywords for which they want to rank.
7. Marketing Using an Influencer
You must have seen celebrities doing election campaigns or advertisements. This is so because people tend to like celebrities and often trust whatever they speak.
Similarly, seo experts and well-known people of your industry can help you in bringing your content in front of your target audience.
They can be involved with you by re-tweeting your content to their followers or if they are bloggers they can mention your content in their blogs as well. Some influences can do it for free as per their familiarity with you. But if you want a long term association with them then you should pay them for their support.
Quality Blogging
Content is KING. So whatever strategy you take in order to promote your content, it will fail if the content of excellent quality. Hence you need quality content in order to rule the internet.
If you have a blog of good quality content then it will cover the topics of interest in detail and thinks that readers need to know.
If the readers find whatever they need from your content, they will be more than happy and would love to subscribe so that they can hear what you have to say in the future as well.
These readers will become loyal readers and prove to be the biggest assets for your blog. They will themselves share your content with their social media contacts and promote your content.
Your blog will get a free and effortless social media promotion.
In my previous blog, I have explained every aspect of creating quality blogs easily. You can go through them. I am sure they will be helpful.
With this, we come to the end of the 5 series blogs on Content Writing and Content Promotion.
The other 4 blogs of this series are:-
I hope this series will help you in becoming a Pro blogger and successful Content Marketers.
Hope you enjoyed the series. Good Luck and keep writing great content.
See you soon with new awesome contents!!
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