How to Launch the Linkbuilding Outreach Process for a New Business (Step-by-Step SEO Guide)

Why is outreach the lifeline for startups & new businesses?

Outreach is a complex process of creating and distributing your content on other sites. It’s crucial for your brand not only to write and publish blog posts on your site, but also to publish content with brand mention on external sites that accept:

• • guest posts, 
  • sponsored posts, 
  • link insertion into existing content, 
  • press-release distribution.

What are the benefits of the outreach process?

You obtain links from other sites that enhance your website metrics. Moreover, you discover new ideas for your blog and further contribute content. The majority of editorial teams ask to approve the topic before writing content, so you have a great opportunity to research content ideas. Also, you can ask to include your product in a listicle article that already generates traffic and can bring you new customers.

Common struggles: no authority, no backlinks, limited trust.

When you start outreach, you can receive a lot of rejection and ignore from the site’s editorial team. Why? The reason is the low authority of the site when you launch your site from scratch.

💡 How to quickly obtain an authority? You can buy an existing domain and rebuild it. Google trusts to old site compared to the new one. 

If you don’t want to launch your brand on the existing name of the domain, you should be ready for step-by-step growth of your site, without starting bump when you purchase the old domain.

It’s disappointing to receive a lot of rejection at the beginning of the campaign, but it’s a long-term game. Just save the contacts of the site’s editors and reach out to them when your site receives metrics like domain authority and traffic to continue cooperation.

Is it necessary to buy SEO tools at the beginning of the outreach campaign?

It’s a great option to use tools like Ahrefs, SemRush, Moz Pro, Serpstat, and SE Ranking. But the average monthly fee will be around $150. You can use this budget to order keyword analysis, and for the next 3-4 months, you will have ideas to write content for your site and for sponsored/guest posts. When you launched your business and decided to grow SEO efforts, you can buy a subscription to analyze your competitors, find new sites to publish sponsored/guest posts, and research additional keywords.
To sum up, you can start without a costly subscription and start writing blog posts, describing your service and case study pages.

Step 1: Set Clear Outreach Goals

What outreach should achieve: backlinks, brand mentions, and partnerships.

Brand mentions

For a new business important to receive as many brand mentions as can. There are three types of mentions of your brand on the external site:

Name of your brand with a no-follow link to your site (it’s good for new visitors to your site, in case of external page has a lot of traffic, but low impact on SEO metrics)

Name of your brand with a do-follow link to your site (it’s good for traffic and for growth of SEO metrics)

Name of your brand in the article without link (it’s great option to increase your brand awareness, but no significant impact to your SEO metrics, anyway you can ask later to add the link to your site)

Backlinks

When you receive a lot of brand mentions, you can extend your link-building campaign to classical anchors based on the keyword analysis of your service and blog pages. In this case, the most usual way to obtain links is through sponsored posts. 

Partnerships

When you launch the site, you can exchange links with other sites or offer your product (promocode, trial, discount) in exchange for mentioning your site. One of the owner of the site offer a free flight in exchange for the link.

“So that’s a good reminder to get backlinks from there …. I usually let people fly for free, and then I get a backlink for free.”

• Aligning outreach goals with business objectives (traffic growth, visibility).
  Every outreach campaign should focus on targets. In most cases client selects the traffic to monitor the outreach activity.

When you don’t have SEO tools:

• Focus on Google Search Console traffic and analytics

When you decide to use SEO tools, you can target specific metrics like:

• DR growth, 
• referral traffic, 
• organic ranking improvements.

Step 2: Research Competitors without SEO tools

To start an outreach campaign, you don’t need all the features of SEO tools. You already know your competitors, so ask ChatGPT or another AI tool to search pages where your competitors publish articles.

You can receive listing links, business profile sites to start your outreach campaign.
After that, use Google search operators

When you have reached most of the prospects, you can use specific SEO tools like Ahrefs to find sites to publish your links. It’s necessary for a linkbuilding campaign, but for initial press-release distribution or digital PR, or listicle outreach, you can use a Google search approach.

Step 3: Qualify and Prioritize Prospects

How to avoid wasted effort: check site relevance & authority. 

My favourite free tool is to use the SimilarWeb web browser extension to check monthly traffic.

Check if the pages of the site are indexed by Google. Let’s see the site https://www.thelondonwire.co.uk/, and it looks like a relevant News site.

You can see that no page is indexed by Google when checking via the “site:https://www.thelondonwire.co.uk/” in Google search.

The next step allows you to avoid spam sites that publish prohibited content. Here are Google search operators to check it.

site:[domainname.com] and casino
site:[domainname.com] and CBD

Additional checks

• WHOIS lookup (e.g., whois.domaintools.com):

Recently registered domains with hidden or suspicious registrant details can be spam indicators. Spam sites are often very new. Cheap domains like .xyz or .info don’t automatically mean spam, but are more often abused.

• Google Transparency Report (transparencyreport.google.com) → Shows if Google flagged the site as unsafe.

https://transparencyreport.google.com/safe-browsing/

• HTTPS: Lack of SSL (no padlock) is a warning sign.
  

Step 4: Create Personalized Outreach Emails

You’ve done a great job gathering a list of sites to publish press releases, digital PR content, guest posts, and sponsored posts. Imagine if you received a positive reply from all your prospects. It’ll be fantastic. Nevertheless, reality shows that the reply rate is low, especially for new startups or even businesses. How to increase the number of replies and not be upset when your email stays without answers.

In my opinion, it’s better to write the letter with topic suggestions and not send the article. You don’t waste your time on writing text that has low chances to published. Instead, you discuss the publication and can add the editor to LinkedIn, X, and start monitoring news of your industry.

Write a custom or generic (template) email? When you have 50 sites to reach out to and a limited time, you can divide them into types of content.

Here is a sample of a pitching topic. The editor of the site has suggested another topic as a reply to our ideas.

Here is an example of a Generic (template) Email

Hi, I manage an advertising campaign for [Brand name] [short description of the product].

I am going to submit a 600-word sponsored post to your site [domain name] with a link to the [Brand name] page.

Do you accept guest/sponsored posts on your site?

Step 5: Execute and Track Outreach

For the first outreach campaign, when you have up to 50 prospects, you can easily usea  Google Excel sheet.

Here is a template to monitor your replies. You can manually change the status and write notes.

What next steps to scale up your campaign?

• Use tools for email automation
  • Send emails (Hunter, Mailshake, Lemlist)
  • Send emails and track your outreach campaign using special software like Buzzstream that allows you to track response rate, link placements, and conversions.
• Use tools to check the status of your links, like brokenlinkcheck.com or Ahrefs, to see new vs lost links.

Step 6: Optimize and Iterate

Be ready for a low amount of replies or if editors stop replying to your emails. That’s why search alternative email and try to reach. You can reach out to editors via LinkedIn. 

Test different subject lines, pitches, and follow-ups for your generic (template emails).

Step 7: Content creation

When you start link building for a startup, you can struggle with content creation. On the previous step, you’ve already approved topics with the site’s editorial team, and they shared with you guidelines like the required number of words. The best approach is to write the article by myself, because you have all the expertise in your field. An alternative way is to delegate this task to one of your team members who also has experience and understanding of your startup ideas.
That’s why we can range content by impact and how the CEO of a startup should be involved to the creation and approval stage.

💡 Why it’s a good idea to assign content creation to a startup team member, neither than experienced copywriters.

Your team members can use all talks during coffee breaks or conference meetings, or share their own research ideas.  

When you start researching a topic, you can find a lot of information that will help you in your daily work.

Anyway, the final draft of content will be checked by a proofreading specialist or an external copywriter to follow all SEO guidelines. 

Conclusion

Consistency and understanding that a link-building outreach campaign is a long-term investment are key to a site’s and your brand’s growth. It’s hard to start with low domain authority and a lack of content, so you need to set clear goals: work on brand mentions, gain a lot of backlinks, or focus only on partnerships. That approach allows you to save time and budget. You can start from manual prospecting and outreach, and after the first results, use costly SEO tools. When your team writes content, it helps to understand your product much better and share your expertise via your own blog posts or guest posts on other sites. Linkbuilding outreach allows for establishing relationships and further partnerships as well. You’ll be surprised when you find a diamond in the rough during your outreach campaigns.

Bonus Section (Optional for SEO)

FAQ Schema-Friendly Section

Why does your site need links?

It gets direct traffic to your site, because your potential customers can follow by link to your site from listicle articles, catalogs, and blog posts from other sites. Also, it helps your service and blog pages to rank keywords, so your leads can easily find you via Google search or ChatGPT results.

What is the difference between link building and outreach?

Link Building is part of SEO when you are trying to get links to your website pages. Outreach is an activity of how you try to achieve it (by reaching out to people).

How do new businesses get backlinks without costly SEO tools?

When you are not ready to invest a lot of money in SEO, you can manually find 30-50 prospects and launch a custom outreach campaign. After the first results, you can scale up your efforts and buy a subscription to the main SEO and outreach tools.