This is find out how to discover an electronic mail deal with for any weblog editor in minutes
You have a brilliant blog post idea.
They know how to be unlucky.
You have read the masthead, contact page, and about page of the blog.
You have figured out which editor to switch to. Twitch your fingers to retype your pitch and send it instantly.
But you don’t see their email address listed on the website and you have no idea what the fudge to find out.
Sound familiar?
Don’t fret and don’t give up hope of getting your pitch into the hands of your dream editor.
I overcame this challenge myself and found some simple online tools that could help me get the email addresses I wanted.
Here is a quick rundown of the 6 tools I find most helpful and how I use them.
Step 1: Confirm the email domain
When I’m trying to find an email address, I usually start with RocketReach.
This is a cool search platform with 5 free reference credits per month. (To claim them you need to create an account, and that’s free too.)
I only use a look-up credit when every other humanly possible path boggles, which is rarely the case.
RocketReach usually provides the best professional and personal email address of the editor you want to reach out to. Mind you, it happened that they provided a choice of 6 possible email addresses of the guy I was trying to find out instead of giving me one that the guy surely used. And that cost me a look-up loan.
But hey, I’ve found that I can get the most out of the platform without paying a fee. 😉
Because after typing a name in the search bar, they practically always find the busy editor I’m looking for. At this point, RocketReach has not yet provided the full email address. So simply entering a name in the search field does not cost you any reference credit. But what they offer right away is extremely useful: the domain – the part after the @ symbol.
With an editor’s domain and name, you have everything you need to make the next tool work.
Step 2: Enter your details into a permutator for email addresses
An email permutator is a tool that allows a large list of possible e-mail addresses for the person you want to reach.
And all you need for an email permutator to crack is the part after the @ symbol and the person’s name.
(If you’ve checked EVERYWHERE on the site but still haven’t found the name of the editor you want, google “Editor Blog X”, “Contact Blog X”, or just “Email Blog X”. This helps Confirm your domain as well.)
If you want to use the same email permutator as me (it’s a self explanatory Excel file) you’ll need to save your own copy. There is a big red arrow pointing to the instructions on how to do this. They are also highlighted in red.
I want you to put the name and domain in the yellow cells of the excel file after saving your email permutator table.
Then the spreadsheet does its thing and all you have to do is copy all 46 email addresses that it prints out.
Done?
Aight!
Now that you are equipped with many possible email addresses, you are ready for the next step.
Step 3: check which email addresses actually exist
I use Contacts + for Gmail to see which email accounts are the best choices. (To use this Google Chrome extension, you need a Gmail account and a Chrome browser.)
Add the Chrome extension, click on it, and sign in with your Gmail account. Then click “Compose” as if you were composing an email.
Now paste all 46 e-mail addresses that you have copied from the e-mail permutator into the address field “to” of your draft e-mail.
Next, move your mouse over each address – but slowly! You don’t want to miss a single character that indicates the account exists.
On the right in this screenshot you can see a small LinkedIn icon. This means that the person in question used this email to sign in to LinkedIn.
There’s no guarantee that the editor hasn’t changed the email account in the meantime, but there is a chance it still exists.
Anyway, Contacts + can find * any * email account that users have signed in to on social media with. No matter if Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Instagram or several other platforms.
And if there isn’t a social media result, there is one more clue.
Do you see the suitcase or bag icon in the picture above just below the LinkedIn logo?
I’ve found it doesn’t pop up very often when you hover over e-addresses in the address field. Fuck knows what it means, but I’ve found it’s a sign that the email address exists.
And I was right. Most of the time, I didn’t get an error message from the mailer daemon after emailing addresses with this symbol.
Sometimes there is even a nice photo of the editor in the address field when you move the mouse over the e-addresses. (And sometimes I’m not sure if the public should see this photo. It always brings a victorious smile to my face.)
Then, knowing that I have won, I will make them happy with an outstanding request or submission. And they answer every time …
…I wish. Of course, finding the email address doesn’t guarantee you’ll get a response – but it’s better than never pitching!
Since we’ve talked about your Gmail account, I’d like to introduce you to another Google Chrome extension that works with Gmail and makes freelance writing a lot easier.
Step 4: check out LinkedIn
Just like Contacts +, the LinkedIn Sales Navigator is a Chrome extension. That means you need a Gmail account as well as a Google Chrome browser to use it.
Unlike Contacts +, which keeps an eye on many social media platforms, Sales Navigator only finds out if people used a specific email address to log into LinkedIn, as the name suggests.
Just add the extension to your browser, open it, copy the email addresses and paste them into the address field like you did when you checked out the previous tool. Hover over it to see what is displayed.
Every now and then you are out of luck with Sales Navigator. In other cases, Contacts + will not return any results even if Sales Navigator was able to link the LinkedIn account to an email address. That’s why it’s good to have both Google Chrome extensions.
Try them out. All of the tools I’ve talked about are free to use – with the exception of RocketReach, which gives you 5 free reference credits per month but charges a fee if you want more.
And if after a few minutes using these tools you don’t come across helpful clues, it’s time to try one more thing. It’s free too.
Step 5: Find email addresses on Twitter
To use this tool, you must have a Twitter account and sign into All My Tweets with your Twitter handle.
You can then enter any Twitter username and view all tweets if they have not been protected.
Occasionally you’ll find an old tweet where an editor posted his precious email address – usually back when he didn’t think some keen bloggers would one day scan their tweets.
And if that doesn’t help you get the email address you want, we’ll just ask the giant who knows everything – almost.
Step 6: guess what, and google
Yes, it’s time to start a search engine and type in things to see what happens.
The first thing I type when trying to guess an email address is [email protected]
If I don’t get any results, I try the same combination with (at) and (dot) instead of the usual symbols.
Often on the search engine’s search results page there is a link to a RocketReach list or an old article where the publisher kindly published his email address.
If my first guess is unsuccessful, I try other combinations, such as the first options the email permutator gave me.
If by chance I googled completely in vain, I will only fire pitches to the email addresses I have found, even if I can’t confirm their existence … but only as a last resort, and I still send my pitches individually, never as a mass spam attack!
And if the mailer demon doesn’t come back with bad news, I’ll know I’ve hit gold. If you don’t see an error message, the email address you attempted probably exists and your pitch has already arrived.
Okay, it’s time to find out the damn elusive editor’s email address so that you can finally get your blog post published.
No excuses – the next step is to prepare and ship your pitch!
If you need help with this, read this or that or that post. Sophie and Lauren’s book “How to Create a Blog Post” is also a great resource to help you create your pitches.
Do you know of more efficient ways to get editors’ email addresses? Do share your thoughts in the comments, I look forward to reading them!
