We love a good cold email teardown. In other words, analyzing why a specific cold email template worked and breaking it down to the smallest details so that both a beginner and an advanced player can extract value from it.

Without further ado, let's get rolling.

Make it about them first

Asking for backlinks is one of the most competitive asks you can make in someone's inbox. Why? Because more and more companies want their websites to rank better and for this they need backlinks to show Google content there is good enough. 

Knowing this, James opted for an unorthodox approach. 

His first email is about establishing connections and building relationships. It's about his prospect's content and what he can do for them, rather than them giving him a backlink. James' ask comes after a relationship has been built... and it worked magnificently.

Quick follow-up reminders

Half of the backlinks James managed to generate came from people who replied to the follow-up emails. He pinged them with a 3-step reminder sequence. According to James, he successfully converted connections who were interested after reading the first email but forgot to reply.

His approach to switch focus and build relationships first helped him to generate lots of backlinks, but we believe that this will help him in the future with other needs as well.

James Miller, Founder of Photographer Touch, wanted to boost his SEO with targeted backlinks. But the classic "can you please link to my website" ask didn't seem to work well. So James decided to switch his focus on building relationships first and building backlinks later.