How To Start A Startup
How we built ContactOut to 8 figures in revenue. Video series with screen shares.
This is our link-building tracker where the team will just put the links that we built, what the domain authority is, when they were built, etc.
Here’s some example documentation about our process that we give to our team for link building. This is for brand mentions, where we search for people that have mentioned ContactOut on their sites. Then, you know, we filter the domain authority of these.
Here’s a reference to a guide by Ahrefs, and here’s the email script that we send out. It’s just saying, 'Hey, you mentioned us; would you care to link to our website as well? That would be greatly appreciated.' That’s it. You know, follow up a couple of times. It’s really not too complicated—the strategy is more about just consistency and sending out a lot of emails. I think we’ve probably built like 800 or so links in total over the course of the years.
Here’s another example outreach: 'Hey Demetri, you know you’ve mentioned these other tools like Clearbit and Sell Hack in your article. Here’s a bit about ContactOut. It would be great to hear your thoughts on us, and if you check us out, consider adding us to the article.' Then I think Demetri is like, 'Hey, do you have a budget for advertising?' and we’re like, 'No, I guess Google doesn’t like people buying links.'
Then he’s like, 'Hey, what if I promote you on my blog, and in return, you can promote us on your blog?' and we’re like, 'Yeah, sure, that kind of works.' One thing to note is that when you’re doing this cross-promotion stuff, you want to check that it is a legitimate site and it’s not like spammy, and you know, it’s not like a link network or private blog network, which are just spam sites where the only purpose is for links.
A really easy way to check this is, does this website have traffic? If they’re getting traffic, then typically it’s a real site. You can also look at the site—does it look spammy? Are there all these spam links? This one looked pretty good, so we were like, 'Sure, let’s do some cross-promotion here.'
