# Module 3.3: The Blitz List: How to Start Link Building Campaigns Fast

Hey, it's Sam Oh and welcome to
the&nbsp;third lesson in the vetting module.
In this lesson, we're going to talk
about what I call a "blitz list."
And a blitz list is simply a fully "ready-to-send"
outreach list which is generated based on
a sample of your vetted prospects.
And in my opinion, this is the key to testing
outreach campaigns efficiently because
the blitz list serves two distinct purposes.
#1. It's going to save you a ton of time
from finding emails because it’s all
done programmatically.
And #2, because only a sample of your big
prospects list will be contacted, it's going
to help you validate your outreach pitch.
Basically, you'll get an idea of how successful
your campaign will be in under an hour so you
can make an educated decision of whether&nbsp;
it's worth continuing with the campaign,
pivoting, or cancelling it altogether.
Now, before we get to this scaling process,
let's briefly look at how single emails are
usually found.
So assuming you're contacting the author of
a&nbsp;post, you'd take that author's name and run
a search through an email finding tool like Hunter.
And if you were taking an extra step to clean
your list of prospects, you'd verify that the email
is deliverable using a tool like Neverbounce.
Now, when you're finding someone that's not
the&nbsp;author, the process takes significantly longer.
You might look through a team page
or the employee directory on LinkedIn
to find the most appropriate contact.
Then you'd have to run the names and domains
through Hunter and validate again with Neverbounce.
Now, assuming there is no team page or
employee directory, you might look at their
Facebook About page or a Terms and Conditions
page only to find generic email addresses.
And by this point, if we're being honest,
we're kind of getting desperate.
The process of finding and validating email&nbsp;
addresses is extremely painful and time-consuming,
which is why people look to networks
like Upwork and Mechanical Turk to&nbsp;get
people who will find emails for you.
And while this might sound smart, I've personally
worked with over 100 different email finders on
various networks and my experience
was nothing but awful.
Some freelancers will find people's&nbsp;personal
email addresses like a gmail address, but you
shouldn't be contacting them there
unless it's stated on their site.
Others will provide lists&nbsp;of invalid email
addresses&nbsp;or generic email addresses
when there are better options.
Plus, human error is real.
Now, for those of you with deep pockets, you
might do it in-house where your link builders
create content, find prospects, vet them, find
the emails, and then send the outreach pitch.
The quality is usually much better, but
it's&nbsp;a super inefficient way to build links.
So is good quality email finding
at affordable&nbsp;rates a lost cause?
No, because there's the blitz list which
is going to help you find&nbsp;valid email
addresses programmatically.
Now, at a high level, you run your list of URLs
through Hunter's Author API, where Hunter will
search for the author of the page and
show&nbsp;you the email address if it exists.
Then you use Never Bounce's API&nbsp;to validate
whether the emails are likely to be deliverable
or not.
To give you an understanding of the scale
of this method, assuming you had a list of
1,000 prospects, it's very possible to find
60-120 email addresses from your vetted
list of prospects and start your outreach
campaign, all within 15-30 minutes.
Now, there are 3 ways you
can create your blitz list.
The first way is to use Google Sheets.
Ideally, you'll want the help of a developer
to create some App Scripts around Hunter's
author finder call and Neverbounce's
email&nbsp;verification call.
This will give you maximum flexibility
in how you format your sheets.
Now, if you want something quick and dirty,
you can start by using Hunter for Sheets,
which&nbsp;is a Google Sheets add-on
made by Hunter.io.
Once you have it installed, all you
need to do is go to the Finder tab,
make sure author finder is selected,&nbsp;choose
the column of your URLs in this box,&nbsp;and when
you're ready, hit the&nbsp;"Find Email Addresses" button.
Hunter will then search for author names
and email addresses and print them into
the corresponding cells when available.
But as you can see, it's not perfect.
And this is why you need to use an email
verification API like Neverbounce.
Again, a custom app script is ideal in
this situation for the sake of speed,
but if you want to go the quick and dirty
route, just go to Neverbounce's Clean tool,
upload a CSV of found email addresses,
and&nbsp;then hit the "Clean my list button."
Once it's completed, hit the&nbsp;Download
button, select ‘All results'&nbsp;and download
your CSV file.
Now, the CSV should&nbsp;look like this, so
you can import that into Google&nbsp;Sheets
and use the VLOOKUP function to match
statuses with your found email addresses.
Alright, the second way is to create
your own custom coded program.
This in my opinion is the best route to
go if you plan to scale email finding
and have detailed specifications on
how you want your workflow to go.
So if you have a link building agency, this
in&nbsp;my opinion, is well worth the investment.
Hunter and Neverbounce's APIs are really easy
to work with and for the basic functionality of
finding and verifying emails, you should be
able to get a basic job done for under $50.
More robust systems will obviously
be much more expensive.
And the third option is to use Google
Sheets with a nocode tool like Zapier.
This is basically like a blended version
of the first two ways I showed you.
You get the simplicity of Google Sheets
with&nbsp;the flexibility of custom coded.
The downside is that it can take a
while to set up if you're not&nbsp;familiar
with logic programming.
Plus, you'll have to use one of Zapier's paid
plans when Appscripts&nbsp;would just be a one-time
fee to a developer.
I won't expand on how to use Zapier because
I already made a full tutorial on creating&nbsp;this
method with the APIs I mentioned so
I'll&nbsp;link that video up in the description.
Now, after you've run your URLs through
these APIs, you should have your blitz list
of ready-to-send emails based on a small
segment of your vetted list of prospects.
But before we can actually send these emails,
you need to choose the outreach approach you'll
go with and write up an email template.
And that's what the next module is all about.
We'll be talking about three different link
outreach approaches, dive deep into what
I think is the best one, and we'll&nbsp;end it off with
a tutorial on how you can write good outreach
templates without it sounding too templated.
I'll see you there.