How to Get in Contact With Anyone

There’s nothing worse than getting into a heated debate with a friend and kickin’ their ass, only to find out they weren’t paying attention. 

You didn’t stutter. You had your argument down. But it was all a waste of time.

That’s the feeling I get whenever I send an outreach email and realize I never even got the right email address….

Even worse, the dreaded kickback message from Gmail:

I put so much time and energy into creating content, building lists, crafting a sexy outreach email, and ensuring email deliverability is on-point only to find out none of this matters because I didn’t find the right email address.

Today, this is the problem I want to help you solve. 

There are two points worth noting before we dive in:

• I still find email outreach to be the most scalable method, yet there is a better way: social media.
  

• While this article focuses on finding contact info for link building, this is relevant for many facets of business. Finding a hiring manager's email for a job you’re applying to, B2B sales, lead generation, and so on. 

Who should you contact?

This largely depends on how big the website is. 

If the website is owned by only one person, find them.

If the website is a big organization, then grab the email address for anyone with a title that sounds important. For example:

• Editor

• Managing Editor

• Senior Editor

• Publisher

• Marketing Manager

These people are likely decision makers around the blog and can approve link insertions, guest posts, and other collaboration opportunities.

Please don’t go emailing the CEO of Forbes and asking for a link. He ain’t got time for you. 

Where do you find their email address?

The best place to start is the About page, which will look something like this:

• About 

• About Us

• Team

• About Me

• Staff

This can usually be found in the header or footer of a website.

The About page has actually become more reliable these days because of E-E-A-T. Most websites are dumping their email addresses (and social links) onto these pages to show Google there are real people behind them.

If the About Us page doesn’t produce any results, then look for the Contact page (duh). 

This should be second priority on your SOP because the Contact page typically only displays generic email addresses, whereas the About page will produce personal email addresses.

Remember: Personal email addresses are HIGHLY preferred over generic ones. 

A Contact page should be clearly indicated:

• Contact

• Contact Us

• Contact Me

Like the About page, Contact pages can usually be found in the header or footer of a website.

If this strategy also doesn’t produce an email, then look for a Facebook icon on the website and go to the organization’s Facebook page. This is HIGHLY underutilized. Everyone scrapes websites for email addresses, but no one takes the time to go check socials. 

A link to the Facebook page can usually be found in the header or footer of a website via a little Facebook icon. 

Once on the Facebook page, click on the About section:

There will be a Contact and Basic Info tab, which may show an email address:

Last but not least, look for a YouTube channel. Again, people hardly ever check these but an email address is always listed because YouTube requires it.

Now, manually doing this takes a ton of time, and when you’re trying to email 5,000+ people a month, ain’t nobody got time for that. 

One tool I’ve been using for YEARS to help with this process is Hunter.io.

Hunter.io is a database and email finder (along with many other features), and I can’t recommend it enough. You can find a couple of others that have come to market — Apollo, Snovio, etc. — but I’ve always had the best success with Hunter.

I’ve asked Antonio Gabrić, Outreach Manager at Hunter, to help me show off some of the best ways to use the software.

Gather a list of websites you want to reach out to and then bulk import them into Hunter. Hunter will then find all relevant contact details along with the role of the person who manages each inbox, e.g., Marketing Manager, Custom Support, etc.

Remember what I said above when picking out the right person to contact. 

To top it off, you can — and should — verify all the emails to make sure they are active and deliverable. Sending a ton of emails to inactive email addresses causes your bounce rate to increase and there is nothing worse than fixing deliverability issues…trust me.

Trust, but verify!

But wait, there is a better approach than email

I absolutely love reaching out via social media. I can’t recommend doing this for every website you want to get in touch with because it’s not as scalable, but for those sites where you really want to build a relationship (those Tier 3 sites), do this.

You should generally outreach via social media for any website DR 40+ or to anyone that clearly has influence within your niche.

We had a team member doing outreach via Instagram for a fitness brand and they crushed it. 

Not only was the close rate higher, but the average DR and traffic was significantly better than what we were getting via email outreach. 

To top it off, we were able to build genuine relationships with the websites we reached out to. They became followers, we could collab on IG posts, and they supported the brand in every sense of the word.

Now, two things worth noting:

First, Fitness and Instagram go hand-in-hand. Everyone in the fitness community is on IG because it’s highly visual. They love looking at themselves and other bodies — I say this with love as someone in the fitness community. 

IG might not be the move for your niche, so don’t go blindly testing it. Figure out where your niche is hanging out and do outreach via those social platforms. 

Second, the account that we were doing IG outreach for was bang on. It showed our client (the owner of the brand) in the gym, working out, training people, and really living a fitness lifestyle. This showed the target websites that they were a real person within the niche.

If I were to try and get guest posts to promote this newsletter, I’d be emailing people and connecting with them on LinkedIn. I’ve got a solid presence there and post everyday. 

If they check me out, they know I’m real and can see I’m actively growing in the SEO world.

Now, when it comes to what to say in your outreach DM, check out my post on outreach tips where I give real examples.

In general, be genuine and try to build a relationship with them. Let them see you’re real.

By the way, sometimes you won’t get a DM back because you go into the “requested” folder of social media’s DMs. 

If that happens, try leaving a comment on one of their recent posts explaining that you sent them a DM. I did this last week and got a reply within an hour. 

Social media outreach might not be as scalable but this is where quality > quantity comes into play. We’re all about sustainable growth over here at Shitty SEO Advice, and this is a great way to achieve this.

Now, go out and take action. Send this article to your team members. Get the right email addresses. Try outreach via social media. 

Test shit and see what works. Even if you fail, you still succeed because failure is the best teacher of them all.

As always, hit me up with any feedback you have. I love hearing from you and I’m always happy to dive deeper into details should you have any questions.

Much love ✌️