HOW TO REACH ANY EDITOR AT FORBES: Cold Email 101

hey guys girls my name is Varun Nayak and I am the co-author of pajama profit which is a Bloomsbury published manual on how you can get started being a freelancer I can get good at it and then how to build it into a sustainable kind of practice the books available for pre-order right now you can get it on 18 July it's available on Amazon flip card book stores around you make sure you go and get a copy cool so now that we of this hand it is mint is done let's get the meat of things right and starts with I would say a story when I was 18 years old I knew one thing I could feel it in my bones day in and day out I did not want to work for somebody else right and I was adamant and stubborn about it I said I'm either gonna start something in my own or I'm gonna become a freelancer right and she looked at me in her life what should we because they were all sitting for placements and getting jobs and whatnot and I said no I'm gonna figure this out right and I was confused about starting things in all honesty when I looked around me and when people are confused about something they look up the authority figure so I looked up and I saw you know mostly the influencers right and they were talking about you know how to start a company or the mindset you need and I was like okay cool that's all fine dude but all I see on your posts are motivational quotes right how do I actually start a company how do I hire somebody what does it cost me how do I learn Photoshop how do I sell right and none of those tangibles were actually they're like boring bits everybody was skimming over so I promised myself that if I at least get a reasonably successful of doing this I'm gonna write about it or I'm gonna vlog about it I'm gonna make sure it's very tangible right I'm going to tell you exactly how to do certain things so in the spirit of that this video is specifically about outreach I would not be where I am today if I did not know how to use email has opened more doors for me than anything else on the planet right and I want to kind of teach you how to do the same thing so on this video we're gonna reach out to senior editors at Forbes via email and get positive replies it looks it sounds like a Herculean task but let me show you how easy it is imagine the implications for this in your own life how about getting new projects getting press just reaching out to people who you look up to right email is very powerful and hopefully this video you learn how to use email effectively to open any door for you alright guys we're back so like I mentioned we're gonna find people at fobs and we're gonna send them emails the best people do message especially if you're a Content writer are editors and how we're gonna do that is we're gonna find these editors either wire Google or Twitter right because most of them have a personal presence now at work at Avalon labs we've got very powerful tools to find somebody's email but I'm gonna show you how I do it if I had none of these tools full disclosure I've already done this experiment before so I'm just repeating the steps required to kind of show you how it's done and then I'll show you the results of the experiment because I've already done at a week ago right so here's how we begin I would go to Google and I would look for Forbes editors write Twitter right and I would just open a new tab with you know maybe a couple of names all right so these are Twitter IDs and from their names we need to now find out what their emails are I use a tool called email matcher to do this let me just open it up even macho use a funky algorithm of the back end to kind of guess what a person's email ids so what you do is you put in somebody's full name say it's Steve ball Tony Steve Bertoni and he's got a domain of forbes. com all right I'm gonna make sure I'm not a bot and then I click on find email right now this there's some you know Matt that's done behind this and it gets this person's email so all I have to do now is copy this email and create a new excel sheet I'm going to let's see your blank will book I'm going to say name so it was a first name last name I'm gonna say email I'm gonna say company all right so I'm just gonna put his email right here I'm gonna say his first name is Steve last name is Tony and just open this up a little bit so excels a critical skill for almost all of business right so you have to learn this and company Fox alright so then I save the sheet I say save it to my computer I'm not gonna save it right now but basically you save the sheet you keep filling it up with more names maybe

there's somebody else in different companies we just need these details of this and we need to know that they're senior editors at these companies right and then what I do is I go back to Firefox my browser and I open this amazing tool that we use called mail shake I'm just going to log into the tool so now what we're going to do is you know we're gonna use a tool called milkshake now mail shake works on the hypothesis that people don't that people are busy right or they just they're not interested enough in what you are doing at the first go so it works in the hypothesis that if you send a person email multiple times there's a good chance he or she will reply after the second or third kind of email we call these drips and I call this technique ultra drip right so what we're gonna do is these emails that we found and we put in an excel sheet we are going to send them multiple drips of emails spaced out by three days so we're gonna send one email three days later we're gonna send another email in all three days later we're going to send a third email and then finally we're gonna send a breakup email and say hey you know we think I think you're not interesting what I want to do so for this experiment I just I read sort of a few Forbes editors and I just said you know what I want to be a contributor on Fox right it's just an experiment and I sent out this campaign on 27 June I sent it out to ten different people and let me just show you the stats ten people all them people receive the emails nine of them open them 90 percent open rate is insane right out of which three replied so let's just look at the replies right so three people replied and I can just show you the replies right here and Muslim replied either the second or the third drip right and you can see that you know for example this person said I forward you request the correct person to handle your they literally if they're interesting think you're fit for what they need contributor wise somebody is replied saying you know let me just see where that is yep thank you for reaching out we are indeed looking for I writers willing to write 5 a 7ex a month I only handle entertainment related freelancers but if that dress you I can connect you to all my colleagues in the tech team which he did introduce me to somebody from the tech team so as you can see guys you know it's extremely simple to find somebody's email and send them emails but you gotta do it multiple times and the best way to do it is with the tool male shake is just $19 a month and there are free alternatives to it too I you just have to look for them folks by now you know that it's possible to reach out to absolutely anybody all you have to do is find out their email send them multiple trips of emails and then finally and most partly get positive replies one of the things you're probably wondering is what was it content of those emails right what did you actually send them what was the script of that email now I want to leave something for the book so make sure you go out there grab a copy of pajama prophet like I mentioned before it's available for pre-order so go out there and grab a copy oh and PS I'm gonna be doing more of these the next video is titled how much does it actually cost to run a freelance agency in India so if that's a topic that interests you make sure you tune in to my Instagram make sure you follow me on Twitter and I'll see you whenever I see you