Blogger outreach resembles conventional PR in many ways. You need to make and do things that people care about if you want them to talk about your brand. However, blogger outreach focuses on influencers instead of major news outlets, so you’ll generally email specific individuals instead of a broad “media inquiries” mailbox. Therefore, you cannot approach outreach in the same scattershot manner that you do with PR.
Building relationships is essential if you want to dominate blogger outreach. By contacting influential bloggers, you engage your peers. Even if a group of editors oversees the content for a sizable site, you’ll probably collaborate with a single person on how to please (and excite) their readership. Therefore, suggest adaptable and cooperative concepts and design objectives centered on the blogger and their audience.
Going Beyond Backlinks
Although blogger outreach significantly affects SEO, the benefits go far beyond backlinks—your brand gains from long-term brand awareness and audience trust when you develop relationships.
Particularly concerning young brands like the online bank we previously discussed, Unlike national periodicals, blogs typically have a more earnest and devoted readership. Therefore, a significant portion of that trust is significantly transferred to your brand when you work with them.
Develop a Plan for Blogger Outreach
The “let’s do everything but blogging” approach causes many SEO teams to waste months on less unpredictable content creation and on-site optimization.
Additionally, you are more likely to run into this mindset the more fantastic the brand is. Although it may seem paradoxical, on-site optimization is a better option because of the size of the outreach needed to make a difference for an enterprise organization.
It isn’t a good time to spend hours on outreach campaigns for extra links when your company has a backlink profile with hundreds of thousands or millions of connections.
However, as Google attests, high-quality backlinks are one of the most critical variables to maintain rankings in the SERPs. Nowadays, markets are being disrupted everywhere. By letting up on the gas, your company opens itself up to competition from brash newcomers with a compelling message and superior digital customer experience strategy that bloggers are ready to cover and link to.
Scalable blogger outreach is feasible and crucial for the organic growth of your business with the correct infrastructure in place.
Choose Your Bloggers
How do you pick the appropriate bloggers to contact? Find blogs that will interest your audience. They can fit into your target market. However, they must address significant issues in your sector. For instance, Nike may target writers of healthy lifestyle blogs who discuss exercise and a balanced diet.
Most likely, you’ve already made a list of pertinent blogs. But you can also find thousands of fresh opportunities using Google.
Pitchbox can compile a list of prospective targets if you prefer using tools. Then, using a program like Airtable, you may create an internal database.
Categorize Your Blog Audience
The study of bloggers is a rabbit hole. You begin with a straightforward Google search. In addition to posts full of crafted blog suggestions and resource lists, this returns blogs. Then, before you realize it, your database contains hundreds of targets. That’s beneficial because when working at scale, we need options. Prioritization is crucial, though.
Prioritizing blog partnerships most effectively involves concentrating on their niche and SEO criteria like domain authority (Moz) or Domain Rating (Ahrefs). However, you may also add entries for projected traffic, engagement, and social media followers.
Your blogger outreach list should be sorted by domain authority and divided into niches. This is crucial if your brand caters to several audience groups. The bloggers you work with for your men’s sportswear ads will be very different from those you work with for your women’s running shoe line.
Looking for the Right Contact Info
It should be easy to get in touch with someone by visiting their LinkedIn profile, “Contact,” or “About” page. You can still message them even if their messaging is disabled for everyone who isn’t the first connection by using a tool like Sales Navigator. Also, remember to check out their profile! There, some bloggers list their email addresses.
Also, keep in mind that only some people run or own a blog. Organizations or publications run numerous blogs. Some bloggers have achieved such popularity that they now employ staff members. So keep an eye out for content managers and editors as well.
Engage in Social Networking
Engage with your bloggers on social media to get on their radar. Share their posts and add your thoughts, no matter how brief. The best location to meet bloggers in your niche is on LinkedIn. Many people use the site to share their posts, which gives you the ideal opportunity to remark and reshare. Increase your response rate by communicating often.
Despite having limited character counts, Twitter excels as a networking tool because of its ease. By following, liking, and commenting on blogs, you can demonstrate to them that you are an engaged member of their community.
You ought to leave direct comments on their blogs as well. As long as they are pertinent and supportive, especially ones from well-known firms, bloggers adore comments.
Most essential, don’t behave like a networking bot—be a real human being. Consider how you can increase their chances of success. Bloggers are considerably more responsive to your request when they feel they are doing you a favor.
Understand What You Need to Ask for
It’s essential to be clear about your objectives before you begin, whether you’re emailing to ask about guest blogging or prospecting for long-term content cooperation.
For example, if you’re interested in SEO, you might choose websites for guest posts based on their relevancy and domain authority. If you prefer social media amplification, you could also develop an influencer marketing division for new bloggers who don’t yet have a website but have a sizable following on Instagram or YouTube.
Decide what you should ask for each item on your list of priorities as you work your way down. Spend time reading your target audience’s blog and note the information that appeals to them.
Use Bigger Blogger Strategies
Pique Their Interest
A pushy email subject line could put you in the spam bin or on a blacklist for emails. However, if your email’s subject line needs to clarify your intention, a blogger is likely to open it. Strive for both clarity and fascination to split the difference.
Be Personal
Utilize the information you learned from your blogger study to tailor your request so that your initial email stands out. Email templates are fantastic, but bloggers must feel that you have given them special consideration and that you are not just adding their names to a list.
Writing a great novel or heaping praise on your blogger are not examples of personalization. It simply entails providing evidence that you have read their writings. During your outreach campaign, you seriously thought about the name on your list that you took care of in determining whether they fit and that you won’t squander their time.
Display the Benefits to Them
When you interact with a blogger, you’re advancing a business alliance.
There must be an awareness of mutual gain. What makes your infographic appealing to the blogger’s readership if you share one? How does your writing improve the blog in any way? How does the material arouse the readers’ interest in the blog?
Determine the gap in your blogger’s material that you hope to fill whenever possible. They only require your material if your blog post is just a rehash of what they frequently write about. Try offering marginally off-topic material for the blogger but still has a solid connection to the audience’s interests.
Make It Simple
People who run blogs are frequently swamped with questions and demands. However, many need more specificity, are self-serving, or don’t benefit blog readers. All of this merely wastes the blogger’s or blog editor’s time and increases their responsibility to determine what to do with your inquiry. The more challenging you make things, the more likely they will hit “Delete” and go on.
Make it clear that the blogger can participate in as much or as little of the proposed joint content initiative as they like. If all they want are ideas from you and would instead produce the material themselves, then provide them all the resources they require—talking points, information, interviews, etc.—to succeed.
Finally, letting your blogger choose the subject or providing them with a flowchart of possibilities will be helpful. However, you’re not. Your blogger wants to know that you completed the research; they want to avoid having to put in the effort to find the most outstanding solution.
Build Connections
You are more likely to leave a lasting impression on someone if you interact with them frequently and in a memorable way. Another advantage of developing connections versus approaching outreach as a series of one-off transactions is that it is simpler for you to work together frequently over time. Pitching fresh ideas that are favorably appreciated will become easier and easier as you grow to know the blogger’s or editor’s preferences.
Scale Up Your Blog Outreach Methods
Developing relationships, sending tailored outreach emails, and reading the blog. There will inevitably be some manual labor involved. Automate as much remaining work as possible to free up your time to cultivate your priority relationships.
Make Templates
Both personalization and templates are crucial. Therefore, make a template for your request and add customized components. Your bloggers are aware of using templates. They only ask for a friendly nod of recognition before you start speaking.
Do Follow-Ups
Everybody gets busy, including bloggers. Allow them time to respond, and then courteously follow up. To give you something to talk about in your follow-up, it might assist if you share any of their content on social media and tag them.
Look for email deliverability difficulties that can send your messages to the spam abyss if you find that your response rate could be higher and that follow-up emails could be more effective.
Systemize Finding New Clients
There will always be industry stalwarts, but as newcomers establish the authority you seek, your list of new prospects should change. To avoid reinventing the wheel with each outreach effort, develop a system that can reflect this dynamic pace. With the discovery and quality filtering, you may automate prospecting with blogger outreach tools. However, there are drawbacks to excessive automation.
Cast a Broad (Yet Particular) Net
Marketers may fall into the myth that they can be both broad-reaching and laser-focused at different times. However, the sheer number of internet users does not support that view. Over two trillion searches are done on Google annually, or 63,000 each second. Due to this magnitude, even the most specialized topics have some significant statistics supporting them.
To ensure that you take advantage of every opportunity, cast a wide net first, then focus your list. We might employ the most precisely targeted set of criteria when using our nine million-entry database to restrict our selection and still have thousands of choices.
Monitor Output & Offer Dashboard Monitoring
Establish a system for tracking the outcomes of your outreach efforts so you can identify the blogs that send you the highest-quality traffic. As your backlink profile expands, you’ll start dealing with more moving aspects in your analytics. To handle that, customized dashboards are crucial. They pull the precise information you need so you can view it on the go. To develop personalized dashboards and establish conversion targets specific to outreach, create a new view in Google Analytics.
Join Forces With an SEO Firm
A component of internal marketing that is ready for outside assistance is outreach at scale. It requires particular skills, outreach instruments, and procedures. It takes a lot of time. In-house employees that will truly put in the time and desire to do it week in and week out are hard to come by, unlike in PR. You’ll get ten times the outcomes in half the time if you work with an agency that has its procedure down to a science.
