Using the Xobni Outlook Plugin for Link Building

13th April 2010 · Paddy · No Comments »

Last month I spoke at Think Visibility about Getting the Links that Matter. Part of my presentation focused on getting the attention of the person you want to get a link from. The traditional method that most people go with is email – I pointed out that a phone call is better but we are all geeks and don’t like using the phone

I have found a neat way to still use someones email address but perhaps find out more info about them so that you can contact them through some other means. If you install an Outlook extension called Xobni, you can find social media accounts held by the person you are emailing. You can see an example of this in the screenshot below. (The blurred parts are my email and phone number)

In this example, I can see that the person I’m contacting also has Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin accounts, so there is the possibility of contacting them via one of these accounts as well as their regular email. You can even use a combination of both, perhaps a tweet followed up by an email. It can also help if you haven’t already got the persons name, chances are that you can see their full name from their Facebook account as well as seeing part of their profile.

Using xobni you can also see links between yourself and the person you are emailing, for example if one of your other email contacts has already contacted this person, it will show up in the sidebar. This can be very useful because you have “an in”, you can mention this other person in the email and it may help get the persons attention.

This is just another small tip which can make a big difference to your link building conversion rate and give you a little bit more chance of getting a reply and getting the link you want.