Using Boomerang for Link Building Outreach

16th January 2012 · Paddy · No Comments »

Quick and easy link building post today. Hat tip to John Doherty for mentioning the awesome Boomerang Gmail app to me whilst we were in New York.

Update: Looks like great minds think alike! John published this post a few hours ago over on SEOmoz which talks about Boomerang and other great ways to use Gmail to boost your outreach efficiency.

Boomerang is designed as a productivity tool, particularly for those who are fans of inbox=0 and processing email at particular times rather than as it comes in. The basic features allow you to schedule sending, tell you when someone doesn’t reply as well as Boomerang an email back to you at your chosen time of processing email.

I originally installed for these reasons and to aid to my inbox=0 and email processing efforts, then quickly realised a couple of the features could come in handy when doing link building outreach. I started using it as part of my own outreach and it has worked pretty well thus far, so I thought I’d share.

Letting you know when you don’t get a reply

Its always nice to get a reply from your link targets first time, but sometimes that doesn’t happen and you’ll need to follow up. Using Boomerang, you can get a reminder if someone doesn’t reply using this setting:

Really nice feature and it takes literally two seconds to set up. If I don’t get a reply, the email will “come back” in two days or whatever time period I choose.

Scheduling emails

I haven’t used this one loads to be honest but if you are doing some advanced link building in terms of timing your outreach, then this could come in handy. I know that some people (mainly journalists and high level bloggers) can sometimes be more likely to respond at certain times, so this feature could help with that.

Basically, you can compose your emails, then set them to go out at a certain time:

It is very easy to do and thus far, very reliable.

Going through outreach replies at a specified time

I haven’t used this one but it occurred to me that it could be useful depending on how you manage your time on client projects.

If you get a reply to an outreach email, but you are buried deep in another client project, then you can tell the email to come back at a time when you are planning to work on that client. I know some of you are thinking “why not just leave it in your inbox until you’re ready?”. Well those who are thinking that may want to watch this video on inbox=0