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What is blogger outreach?
It is the process of reaching out to relevant bloggers and influencers in your niche to promote your product or content. The goal of any blogger outreach campaign is to acquire backlinks and/or to promote.
Some bloggers treat it as spam since lots of outreach teams seem to be either reaching out to the wrong prospects, not building enough trust, or simply just not promoting good content.
If done correctly, blogger outreach can bring many benefits to your site. From getting relevant and high converting traffic to ranking the top of the search engine results page.
Executing blogger outreach campaigns can be quite a handful with the different processes involved, but as it turns out, you will only need to remember the most essential things to succeed and obtain your marketing goals. Here are the 4 things you should be doing in your outreach campaign:
1. Looking for the right link prospects
Just because you saw an influencer with a big following and website, doesn’t mean you have to get a backlink from them directly.
Yes, everybody wants to get high authority backlinks, but even with that in mind, you should still and only be reaching out to relevant blogs who will most likely be interested in the content or products you have to offer.
How to look for blogger prospects
● Know your target audience
Relevancy is always the key to any link building campaign. So how would you identify if a link from a blog would bring value to you?
It’s simple!
Do you have the same or lookalike audience? And does their site have a high or acceptable domain authority level?
If so, you just got yourself a potential prospect!
● Find blogs with similar content
If you run a digital marketing blog, it would be nonsense if you would try to get a backlink from a food review blog. Even though that food review blog has a domain authority of 95, it still doesn’t make sense for anyone not on the food niche to be linking to that site.
With Google being able to detect link spam and whatnots with their crazy algorithms, they have the authority to penalize websites that have unnatural links. Be sure to be smart with who you’re linking to.
Linking and relevancy should always go hand in hand.
● Look for their accurate contact details
This stage is where outreach specialists usually have a hard time on. Since not all bloggers and webmasters make it easy to contact them.
For most of the time, this is done by automation tools to increase efficiency and save time. But it does get tricky when you’re trying to find the right contact information for that lead. You don’t want to be wasting time repeatedly sending follow up emails to the wrong address.
You can use the tool Hunter.io. What this tool does is it lets you find the appropriate emails available from a website’s domain.
Simply enter your lead’s domain on the search box, and you’ll find a list of people who works under that blog with their full name, email address, social profiles, position, and many others.
2. Simplify your outreach emails
No need to be clever with your emails. The shorter and more direct to the point it is, the better.
Bloggers and influencers are very busy people. They don’t have the time to skim through your 3-page email promoting your content and asking for a link.
Keep it short, sweet, and probably add in a little bit of humor in there while still keeping it professional.
3. Always think creatively
Before you reach out to your prospect, think in advance why they would want to collaborate or link with you?
What are you willing to contribute to their blog that hasn’t been done in any other blog on the planet?
If your product’s concept is something new in the market, you can easily capture their attention and you have higher chances of collaboration happening. But if it’s another version of a product that already exists in the market, you need to look for a unique and creative selling angle.
4. Build trust first
Most influencers and bloggers don’t usually want to collaborate or link back to people they don’t know. With blogger outreach, it’s all about building relationships and trust.
Before even sending them a pitch, connect with them on social media, comment on their blog posts, or invite them even for coffee if you’re lucky they live in the same area.
Aside from proposing something creative and out of the box, if a trust is built between both parties, collaborations would happen again in both your futures.
Main tools you’ll need for blogger outreach
Blogger outreach tools are essential in getting accurate information of your prospect contacts, automating your email outreach process, and searching for which blogs to contact.
● Pitchbox
Known as one of the most well-known tools for blogger and influencer outreach. Right from the platform, you can send emails and set automatic follow-ups. In Pitchbox, you can also search for likely prospects for outreach and their contact information.
● BuzzStream
BuzzStream is a tool with similar functionality as Pitchbox. You can send and receive emails, create email templates, search for likely prospects with their contact information as well as their social media accounts.
● SEMrush
Doing your research for prospect backlinks and your competitor’s backlinks are essential if you want to be ahead of the game. In SEMrush, they have a Backlink Audit feature where you can enter any domain and can see a list of websites linking to it with their authority score, page score, etc.
Summed Up Wisdom
Blogger outreach is a tricky campaign to execute correctly. There will be lots of obstacles as you go along since you’ll be dealing with busy people with different personalities.
If not done right, you can either make relationships and build trust with many influencers or lose a large number of perfect prospects forever. To prevent that from happening in your future, always keep in mind that you want both parties to benefit in this campaign and not just you.
So when you send over your pitch or proposal to the blogger, only send over something that’s original and of quality. Though sometimes it will depend on how much you’re willing to pay them.
