10x Your Outreach Game

I’ve said it dozens of times on my LinkedIn — Freelancing survives on 3 things:

Outreach
Outreach
Outreach

But I could not have been more wrong. Freelancing doesn’t survive on just outreach. It survives on — Effective Outreach.

At least not until your business can run on referrals and inbound leads (those lucky ducks). 

Well, until then, let’s use our sweat and blood (not literally) to get better at this survival game.

I’ve, in recent months, run my fair share of outreach experiments. I’m sharing my learnings here so you don’t have to spend the time figuring it out. You can apply it directly. 

Shall we begin?

Hack to Collect Emails

If the algorithm has ever ruined your reach (I can hear you sigh) or your mood — SAME.  But sometimes, you can use it to your advantage. Like in this case, or when you’re hunting for that perfect yellow Anarkali suit (hello Instagram ads).

I’ve used Instagram’s ‘suggested for you’ feature to build a list of ‘mental health organisations.’

You can do the same on LinkedIn, too. Here’s how:

• Go to any platform (Ig or LI) and search for an account in your niche.

Niche like: cosmetic brands, mental health organisations, SaaS companies, you get the gist, right?

• LinkedIn shows similar accounts on the right side (see the image), and Instagram shows them by tapping on the third icon next to the Follow and Message buttons. (again, see the image for the reference)

And just like that, you’ve created a solid list of companies in your niche. Without any tools, without burning your pockets. Just some algorithm doing its magic.

P.S. If you have any questions regarding this, feel free to reply to this email, and I’ll answer them.

AI Prompts to the Rescue

AI AI sab roye
Kaam ki baat kare na koi
Jo kaam ki baat kare 
Toh AI ka rona na roye

The great debate, whether to use AI for writing or not — is best left to the experts. But we can at least use it to sharpen our outreach emails. What say? 

I’ve been using LLMs to write more effective cold emails, and ngl, it works!

One fine day, I was at DWS (Deep working sessions) with friends, trying to write a cold email. I don’t know how, and thank God it happened, I stumbled upon this prompt. (Good brain, iykyk). I showed my email to chatgpt and asked it to rate it out of 10 and tell me ways to make it 10/10. 

It made the email more personalised. The success rate of those emails was way better than I expected. Just to give you some numbers — I sent 8 emails that day using the prompt and received 5 replies (one came after a follow-up).

P.S. I play a lot with this prompt. Sometimes I feed it the hiring post. Other times, I tell it in detail about my relevant experience for the gig. One time, I gave it the goal of the email. 

It is all About Positioning

I noticed one gap in my outreach game — I was getting the replies, but somehow they were low-paying gigs. This bothered me, so I started digging in to fix this. 

Then I realised — I  needed to position myself better.

My emails, though personalised (P.S. The more personalised, the better), still made me sound generic. I was coming off as an option and not as someone they must contact.  

 Are you getting me?

The latter is how you create an opportunity even when there isn’t one. Because now they feel like they are missing out. 

The result after fixing the positioning is yet to be analysed. I’ll do it once I have enough data.

I hope you’ve stayed with me till here, and again, feel free to drop your questions. 

That’s it from my side. These were a few recent things I’ve learned about doing more effective outreach. I hope they are helpful. 

Try these, test them and make them yours. That’s the point of Charaiveti — keep moving.

I’ll be back soon with another — no fluff, just what’s working.

Until the next time,

Radhey Shyam!

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