Do you ever feel like your inbox is overflowing?
I know I do!
I don’t know how many emails I get per day.
It has to be hundreds…
But here’s how I decide who to work with.
(And how to get the most out of every deal)
If you do outreach, this may help you with that.
Or if you get outreached to by brands, this will help you secure a great deal every time.
Firstly,
I want to see my name.
If an email starts with ‘hi dear’, ‘dear sir’ or anything generic, I’m out.
My name is on my website, so if someone can’t take ten seconds to find it and type it, they don’t deserve ten seconds of my time to read the email.
Sorry, not sorry.
Secondly,
I want to see their name.
Who are you?
If they have a generic Gmail address, I assume they’re burning through email addresses as people hit the spam button.
A brand I recognise is ideal.
But anyone with a branded email address and a proper email signature has my attention.
Okay, so now I’m reading.
I need to know what they want from me.
And what I get in return.
This isn’t the time to be wishy-washy.
They probably want:
- A followed link (via insertion or guest post)
- Traffic (that converts to sales)
- Brand awareness (such as YouTube or social posts)
I want:
- Cold hard cash
- A cut of sales as an affiliate
- A followed link
- A free product
Any combination of these can work.
But when they make an offer.
I almost never accept it.
Why?
Because the first offer isn’t the best offer!
Nobody in their right mind leads with their final offer.
“I want a link insertion on this page and I can pay you $50”.
They probably have at least $250 in the budget for that.
Especially if you give them two links, which is no more work than one.
A note on selling links:
I’m not recommending it. It’s against Google’s guidelines. And there’s a chance that they’ll spam that page with a ton of nasty PBN links and use you as a buffer in between.
But – if the company seems decent and it’s a page I would have linked to anyway for free – I’ll do it.
The same goes for affiliate offers…
“We are excited to offer you a commission of 15% of every sale generated”.
They have the budget to offer you at least 25%.
You just need to tell them why you deserve it.
(Usually – a competitor gives you 25% but you want to make them your top recommendation if possible.)
I like to throw other things into the deal too.
So I might say…
“I understand you can’t stretch past 15%, that’s okay. I can still make you the top recommendation if you could please link to my article from the blog section on your website. This will help it rank higher and get you more sales overall.”
or…
“I’d be happy to write the sponsored post. I can also send traffic to it from my email list and social media to maximise its reach. The total price for this campaign is $450.”
or…
“I’d love to review your product, thank you for offering to send it. As well as writing about it, I can also make a YouTube video recommending it. I’d just need $500 to cover my time.”
So to sum up…
Yes, we get a lot of crap emails and can ignore most of them.
But when you do discover a gem,
Don’t get too excited and bite their hand off too fast.
You can always squeeze more juice from the lemon!
Try offering more than they asked for.
And asking for a little more in return.
It works really well for me.
Until next time!
– NSL