# Module 2.3: How to Segment Link Prospects for Scale

Hey, it's Sam Oh and welcome to the third
lesson in the link prospecting module.
In this lesson, we're going to talk about
segmenting your link prospects so you
can send personalized emails at scale.
And we'll basically be putting together
the pieces from lesson 2.1 on finding
seed prospects, and lesson 2.2
on finding lookalike prospects.
So if you haven't watched those yet, then I highly
recommend doing that before you continue.
Now, I want to clarify what I
mean by "personalized emails."
In my opinion, good personalized emails
are ones where the context of your pitch
is relevant to something specific they've done
or&nbsp;said, or something that's important to them.
For example, if you wanted to get a link from a
page on budgeting, saying something like this
wouldn't be personalized in my books.
"Hey Mitch, I read your post on budgeting methods.
I have a page on credit cards&nbsp;and
how it can help people budget.
Link to me."
All this shows is that you've&nbsp;extracted
the main topic from the title.
On the other hand, if you were
to say something like…
"Hey Mitch, I saw that you're recommending
the&nbsp;50/30/20 rule in your budgeting guide.
Not sure if you're actually using this method for
budgeting,&nbsp;but I tried it and it absolutely sucked.
I found it to be flawed because of [this].
So I created a new budgeting method
called the 90/5/5 rule which does [that].
My personal&nbsp;savings have gone up by 47%
in the last year and should only compound
going forward.
Would love to get your feedback and
perhaps a mention in your post if you dig it?"
The context of the pitch, "feedback and a
mention" aka. a link, is relevant to something
that they've said – and that's recommending
the 50/30/20 budget rule.
Now, this lesson is not about outreach pitches
– we'll get into that in a later module.
The key takeaway from these examples
is that linkable points a.k.a the things that
reveal your seed prospects, naturally
make your outreach emails personalized.
And because lookalike prospects are basically
mirrors of your seeds, you can send almost
the exact same email while maintaining
the personalization factor, enabling you
to scale your outreach campaigns.
Now, to do it efficiently, all you need to
do&nbsp;is group your prospects by segment.
And each segment will get its own unique email.
This, in my opinion, is a much better way to
segment your link prospects compared to more
common techniques based on metric groupings.
Let's run through an example of how
we&nbsp;did this for our SEO stats page.
As I mentioned in previous lessons, when
we were creating our SEO statistics page,
we looked at the anchors report of competing
pages and noticed that the majority of links
were attributable to a specific stat.
For example, you'll see that the stat, 93%,
which is&nbsp;in the context of online experiences,
has led to hundreds of referring domains.
But when we went to the page, there
wasn't even a mention of that stat on it.
So we did some research and found a more recent
stat and added that to our content – 68% of online
experiences begin with a search engine.
Now, by including this stat in our post,
we could&nbsp;send a relevant pitch like:
"Hey, you're mentioning this 93% stat
but it's not on the page you're linking to.
Plus, that's super outdated anyway.
More recent research shows that 68% of online
experiences begin with a search engine."
So with that solidified, we just needed to find
lookalike prospects that mention the old stat,
"93% of online experiences
begin with a search engine."
To do that, we went to the Backlinks report
and&nbsp;set the include filter to show backlinks
that mention "93" in the anchor or
surrounding text of&nbsp;backlinks.
And just like that, we had a segment of over 800
prospects we could send virtually the same email
to while keeping it personalized.
Then we did the same thing for the next stat.
And&nbsp;if we added that stat to our page, we would
create another segment for our outreach campaign.
And within an hour or so, our segments
looked like this, where the stat column
represents the&nbsp;segment, and the number
of referring domains represents the size
of the opportunity.
Now, let's say that the number of links you
got wasn't enough to take pole position.
How would&nbsp;you continue to find
new lookalike prospects?
Well, you could look for more seeds
and lookalikes, or you can automate
prospecting with your existing seeds with&nbsp;
Ahrefs' mentions or Backlinks Alerts.
You can set up a backlinks alert&nbsp;with
a competing URL and get notified&nbsp;&nbsp;
when that page gets new links.
But for link prospecting, I find mentions
alerts to be much more effective.
Ahrefs' Mentions alerts actually uses
the&nbsp;same database as Content Explorer.
So all you&nbsp;would need to do is set your
search query to a footprint like "93% of
online experiences" and set some
base-level metrics filters.
Now, anytime someone mentions that on a page
and&nbsp;our crawler discovers it, you'll get notified
via. email at your set interval and you
can quickly reach out and ask for a link.
This, my friends, is the power of segmentation.
And I may sound like that monkey who won't
stop banging on the cymbals, but I really want
to bring emphasis on the importance
of these 3 steps in link prospecting.
Finding good seed prospects helps you to
carefully craft your content and define your
pitch angles.
Finding lookalike prospects helps you to
create a sizable and relevant list of prospects.
And segmentation helps you
to scale personalized emails.
Everything is connected.
Now, when we had a list of well over
a thousand&nbsp;link prospects, we didn't
just blindly email everyone who
said a specific stat.
There's&nbsp;a process to choose who you should
contact and that happens in the vetting stage.
And that's what the next module is all about.
You'll learn our process to vet and validate
link prospects, decide who you should contact,
and tools and systems that will
help you&nbsp;work more efficiently.
I'll see you there.