Using the next few tips below, you’ll find out how simple blog outreach can be as long as you don’t overcomplicate it.
Blog outreach tips
1. Run small batch tests first
If you’re just getting started with outreach, start slow.
Don’t scale something that doesn’t work for you (yet), so get it working. You’ll need to run several tests to find out what works for you and your outreach.
2. Test different outreach messages
Some messages will perform astoundingly better than others.
Some messages may get zero or very few responses.
It’s important to test different messages so you can find a few that work for you.
3. Personalize everything
When doing outreach, personalization works wonders for getting a reply.
Always address your prospect by their name, never a “Dear Sir”.
This can actually make your prospecting more time-consuming, so if you can find ways to personalize your outreach by using automation (a simple first name mention is only the beginning) you’ll be way ahead of the game.
4. Make sure you have plenty of link-worthy content
Your outreach will be infinitely easier if you’re looking to get some love for a respectable site with good content to link to.
Make sure your site is link worthy and linkable.
5. Don’t give site owners crappy content
If you’re looking to guest post, nobody is going to post that penny-per-word article loaded with grammatical errors that you outsourced abroad. If you want to outsource content, make sure you are outsourcing from competent sources.
Make sure the content has meat and isn’t just fluff.
6. Make your outreach memorable (and interesting)
Want to know what everyone else is doing? Just open your e-mail.
Don’t just copy/paste what everyone else is doing. It’s easy to see what they’re doing. 99% of the outreach I see is a joke.
I get at least 5 outreach e-mails a day now. I can’t remember the last time I read a decent outreach e-mail (I do read them!).
The outreach e-mails we send include a keyword mind map about the article we’re pitching for their blog. This shows we actually have already done some basic keyword research for them and the content we’ll produce for them. We use Entity Explorer for this.
This leads me to the next point…
7. Don’t skimp on content for your guest posts
We go the extra mile to produce content that is relevant and useful for their blog, and we pay a pretty penny for a native US writer to produce it.
The cost we pay for the content we give away in exchange for a link is the biggest expense we have for this process. And it should be.
8. Set a few goals after you know your metrics
You did run small batch tests first, didn’t you?
From this, you should know roughly how many emails you need to send before you land any outreach links.
Set some goals from this.
For example:
“I know it takes around 100 sends before I land a link. Therefore, using my processes I can rely on 1 link per week if I send just 100 outreach messages per week.
That should give our campaign around 4 links per month, which is perfect for our local campaign and is just within budget.”
How does blogger outreach affect your digital marketing strategy?
Reaching out to blogs can help you build stronger relationships with other organizations while growing your online presence. Blogger outreach now sits as one of the top ways of promoting businesses online. It’s more cost-efficient than any other means of promotion.
Other benefits worth mentioning include the following:
- Social networking is necessary for comparative advantage to grow brand and company awareness. Failing to do this is failing to network at a comparative or competitive advantage among others present in your industrial niche, causing you to lose market share potential.
- Reaching out to blogs can also facilitate awareness of changes to your business and its general presence. Engaging in outreach increases brand visibility among your competition. With strong brand visibility, promoting your services and products isn’t as challenging compared to promoting a product/service when you haven’t built any relationships or engagement.
Are you making these blogger outreach mistakes?
1. You are a hard seller
One of the most common mistakes we see is selling too hard.
What most don’t realize at the start is you’re reaching out as a total stranger. Not to mention, popular bloggers and influencers receive hundreds – if not thousands – of messages daily.
When you sell too hard, you lose any chance of an influencer cooperating with you in the future.
So here’s one simple fix to adjust that mistake: Stop thinking about making a sale at the start.
If you’ve been taught sales talk 101 your entire life, now is NOT the time to impress bloggers and influencers with your words. Rather, offer something useful first.
If you’re pitching to influencers all day asking them to promote your product, stop right there. Not because you shouldn’t, but because it’s not the right time to do so.
Outreach isn’t about how smooth you talk or how well you can pitch. The most successful campaigns focus on delivering value first.
2. You are trying to outsmart your competitors
We’ll get straight to the point. DO NOT ask your competitors to promote your competing product/service.
If a freelance writer reached out to a popular writing coach asking to promote their writing course without first considering that this writing coach ALSO sells a writing course to their audience…well…we don’t have to explain what comes next.
Expecting influencers and popular bloggers to take care of the marketing work for you is unprofessional. So what should you do?
Reach out to companies or blogs that complement your product/service. Look for niches related to what you’re selling and reach out to them instead.
3. You are asking for too much
It’s okay to start small. And your chances of success for asking something smaller off the bat is greater than asking for a huge win like “promote my product” when it’s only the first email you’ve sent out.
Ask yourself this: How often would you buy a new product/service just because someone told you it was worth buying?
Case closed.
There’s a reason why blogger outreach is also about building relationships and trust. Deeper relationships and more trust mean it’s more likely for an influencer or company to say “Yes” to what you’re asking. It’s not a 100% guarantee, but it’s also not a flat-out no.
Ask for something smaller at the start. Then, offer something in return. Build the relationship. And if you have an affiliate program, one way of promoting it effectively is to offer them a cut.
Quality blogger outreach VS poor blogger outreach
Quality blogger outreach isn’t limited to email techniques and strategic campaigns.
Now, let’s take a closer look at data visualization.
Appropriate button art, social media inclusion, website linking, and any other backlinks to an organization are all core practices that define quality blogger outreach. Overall, neat data visualization separates great quality from poor quality.
With poor data visualization, how else do you expect your audience to engage and connect with you if they don’t understand what you’re providing them?
As you can tell, poor blogger outreach is the opposite of what we just mentioned above.
Poor quality blogger outreach lacks icons and neat data visualization, with embedded hyperlinks or clashing buttons that stray from crisp and professional appearances on modern websites.
What does reaching out to a blogger look like?
The first steps of a blogger outreach campaign involve a ton of research.
Why? Because understanding who you’re reaching out to is the core best practice of blogger outreach campaigns. Remember, blogger outreach isn’t about sending a bulk email list to every single blogger on the planet.
It’s finding relevant bloggers in your niche, doing research, and promoting value. Let’s look at an example of a step-by-step guide for an outreach process.
Step 1. Find influential relevant bloggers
You can use Google or Alltop to help you in your search.
Use Google or Alltop to search for popular blogs in your niche. For example, if we wanted to find food blogs on Alltop, you’ll find a ton of results pointing to different sites like:
- The Recipe Critic
- Eater
- Binging with Babish
- Foodimentary
- Food Porn
If Alltop doesn’t give you the results you’re looking for, you can stick to the classy approach: Google search. Google is still one of the best search engines to use if you want to build a solid blogger outreach strategy.
The best part? You can be specific about the niche you want to target.
For example, Vegan diet is a smaller niche within the health niche. If you searched for “Vegan diet” along with related keywords like “Vegan diet recipes,” “Losing weight with Vegan food,” “Vegan living do’s and dont’s,” you’ll find a ton of blogs and possibly even influential bloggers.
If you stumble on high (DA) domain authority sites like Everydayhealth.com and Healthline.com, don’t focus on these. Focus on the blogs you can reach out to and grow a community with.
Step 2. Do your research
By now, you should have a handful of bloggers you want to reach out to. A good number would be 20 to 30 bloggers.
As you’re doing your research, keep an eye out for these key metrics:
- Name – Obviously so you can address key influencers or bloggers in your outreach email
- Website/Social Platform – Some bloggers have just a website, while other bloggers have a website and social account like Twitter or Instagram.
- Social Media Following – This tells you how much influence they have on your target audience
- Domain Authority – If you want to improve your link building efforts, assess the website’s domain authority. You can do this by using Ahref’s free online checker. Domain authority (DA) is crucial for link building because you can gauge how a link improves your site’s rankings on Google. A higher DA, for example, improves your success of ranking higher more than a site with a lower DA.
- Comments – Comments are all about trust and community. If a key influencer has a strong following and a lot of comments on their blog or social, it means that blogger has established a loyal community in their niche. A loyal community means more engagement and better opportunities for you. If you publish a blog post on a blogger’s site that has an army of loyal readers, you gain higher traffic compared to a site with low engagement.
Step 3. Provide value
The 2 previous steps are pointless if you don’t do this step.
At this point, you might have a ton of information about the influencers in your niche, but you still have to show these influencers that you and your site exist.
How do you do that?
- Simply follow them on social
- Comment on their blog post or social account
- Share their content on your social & tag them
- You can even send them an email about how much you loved their blog post/article
No hard sell tactics here. Just value.
Why does it matter so much in an outreach campaign? Well, when you provide value, not only do you get on a blogger’s radar, but you also slowly build a level of trust between you and that blogger.
This way, when you start reaching out about your blog post or product/service, they’re much more likely to respond to you than they would if they saw you as a total stranger.
Step 4. Use outreach tools to find their contact info
With outreach tools, you save an entire day’s worth scavenging the online world for a blogger’s email address. Some of the best blogger outreach tools include Hunter.io and Buzzstream.
Step 5. Reach out to bloggers
Some of the most common outreach strategies are guest posting, request for a link, partnerships, and request to share.
If you want your guest post published, there might be blogs that will have a “Write for Us” page. If you also notice that the site itself publishes guest posts (a typical example of this would be “This is a guest post by [Name]” under the Article or Blog Title.), then it’s worth reaching out to these blogs.
Tips before you send out an outreach email
1. Choose the right content type
Do research first on what TYPE of content works well on the blog you plan to reach out to.
Why would a blogger or site want to include content that doesn’t match what they provide their audience with?
For example, a Definitive Guide type of content might work well for Blogger A’s site but not for Blogger B’s. Instead, Blogger B might appreciate a listicle type of content more.
2. Don’t ask for too much at the start
Ask for smaller commitments instead of huge wins.
For example, sending an outreach email, saying “Would it be okay to send you an outline?” is a smaller commitment to ask for than if you said, “I was hoping if you could promote X on your site.”
3. For link requests, be specific
When requesting a link back to your site, be SPECIFIC.
It’s a lot to ask for a site or popular blogger to add a link alone. So in your email, specify the following:
- [Post Title] you found on the blogger’s site
- [URL] & [brief description about your post/article], and;
- [Section or Section Title] that would be a great fit for where your link belongs
When you’re making a request, try to make it as easy as possible for a site or blogger to fulfill that request.
How does influencer marketing compare to outreach for a blog?
Influencer marketing and the overall outreach process are forms of marketing that prioritize different aspects of brand awareness. A simple yet effective way to differentiate the two can be found below:
- Influencer marketing strategy is useful for building brand awareness where key metrics such as reach, engagement, conversions, brand mentions, and site referrals are important qualities for every brand awareness campaign
- A blogger outreach campaign is about acquiring more link juice and overall, boosting a site’s backlink profile. A strong backlink profile tells Google that the site is reliable, trustworthy, and therefore, deserves a higher ranking or spot on Google.
Are influencers and bloggers the same?
There are fundamental differences between bloggers and influencers starting with:
- Influencers aren’t necessarily celebrities, but rather people who have grown a loyal following in their niche and have the power to affect (influence) the purchasing decisions of others.
- A blogger is someone who creates original, valuable content through their own website, also called a blog. A blogger manages their website and has full control of what to post, when to post, and everything else involved in managing their own site.
So, what does this mean?
Owning a blog doesn’t mean you’re an influencer. If you own a blog but don’t have followers or subscribers to influence, then it means bloggers aren’t necessarily influencers.
However, bloggers CAN become influencers.
When a blogger’s site grows in following and engagement, companies may reach out and offer sponsored content where a blogger promotes a company’s products/services through their blog. In exchange, the blogger receives these products/services for free.
If it follows that by promoting a company’s product/service and there’s a rise in clicks, conversions, and sales, then we can say a blogger is somewhat of an influencer.
On the other hand, influencers use their platform be it Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, etc. to promote products and services. Now, an influencer doesn’t need to own a blog to influence the purchasing decisions of others.
If you notice, influencers typically have aesthetic feeds to showcase experiences of products/services and their lifestyle to promote others to buy a specific product/service.
However, they can start a blog as means of building more credibility and expanding their reach.
How does influencer marketing strategy and blogger outreach benefit my business?
Influencer marketing is commonly used to boost brand awareness, but it’s not the only goal:
- Helps companies and brands effectively reach out to their target audience
- Compared to traditional marketing, influencer marketing feels less forced or pushy which creates better engagement and high response rates
- Working with an influencer allows you to build strong partnerships and trust
Meanwhile, blogger outreach marketing has a broader emphasis on spreading awareness through a targeted market area.
Outreach marketing can boost brand awareness too, but it’s mainly targeted towards building more backlinks and improving online reputation.
Through blogger outreach, you can acquire high-quality links to your site and would then improve the following:
- Organic traffic
- Credibility
- Trust
- Reliability in terms of the relevant keyword/s users search for
- Higher rankings in search engines
The way Google measures a site’s credibility is through its link profile. If a website has a strong link profile, Google understands this site to be trustworthy.
For health blogs or websites, for example, this is highly important. Due to the rise of scams and unreputable information, it’s easy for this content to land on a user who might then read about misguided and inaccurate health-related facts.
Google’s algorithm prevents this from happening by allowing only the most trusted and reliable sites to rank high on Google. Sites like healthline.com or Everydayhealth.com for example.
Which is a better strategy to use?
Both strategies are useful since influencer marketing boosts your brand’s online presence while blogger outreach improves your site’s SEO to rank higher and thus gain more organic traffic.
However, the efforts involved in both strategies are different and time-consuming. Blogger outreach typically involves email outreach campaigns that require a ton of research, time, and effort. Even email subject lines are complicated.
Furthermore, a blogger outreach program is more beneficial for a company that wants to improve its link building efforts. Link building is a crucial factor of SEO.
For websites looking to improve their domain authority, increase organic traffic, or even sites that participate in a host of affiliate programs, there’s no doubt blogger outreach is a great strategy to use.
After all, building backlinks isn’t something that happens instantly overnight, but the rewards are worth every minute spent.
Influencer marketing might be less time-consuming but it can also be expensive. Depending on the range of influence an influencer has, a higher follower base in the 30K+ range, for example, will cost a lot more than an influencer with 8k followers.
Finally, this also depends on the mediums or platforms you prefer to reach your target audience through. If your target audience spends a lot of time on Instagram and YouTube, for example, it might be better to find influencers in your niche.
What are the best social media platforms for blog outreach?
The social media platform best for blogger outreach is most likely to be Facebook.
Facebook facilitates greater content awareness than other services, allowing greater extents of uploads and more community posts for increased engagement.
LinkedIn and YouTube are generally not regarded as social media platforms, but they facilitate community engagements in manners similar to social media engagements through organizational professionalism and engaging video presentations.
Businesses can achieve great success by developing promotional videos and professional networking as a complement to a company or business’ overall content marketing strategy.
Blogger outreach tools worth considering
Although social accounts can greatly help, an effective blogger outreach strategy isn’t complete without a blogger outreach tool.
Using a blogger outreach tool helps you contact bloggers and find influential bloggers in your niche in half the time it would normally take to do by manually scouring the Internet.
Some of the best tools you can use include the following:
- Buzzsumo
- NinjaOutreach
- Linkody
- Hunter.io
- Mailshake
- Buzzstream
If you’re looking for budget-friendly tools to start with, we recommend checking out this article to learn more about cheaper options.
How to reduce spam messaging
Naturally, the spam appearance is present when a brand facilitates promotional effort in a random manner focusing on sales rather than creating content with value.
Using your social account can be a great way to reduce spam, build relationships with your audience, and direct traffic to your website.
You can effectively improve your strategy by using outreach emails to contact bloggers or influential bloggers in your niche while using your social account to create valuable content and link content to your site.
A lot of social accounts do this by repurposing the content in their blog.
They take a summary of their blog and use it as a caption while creating a visually appealing post to attract or hook their audience in. When done right, you can direct a large group of your followers onto your site, leading to higher traffic.
Are social channels better than outreach email?
Not at all!
Some might believe it’s better for outreach promotional efforts to be conducted through social media rather than through private email messages, but this isn’t exactly true.
Social media is simply another channel businesses and brands can use to connect and reach their audience. Because the majority of people spend more time on social platforms, it’s only fitting to use these platforms as the base or starting point for reaching out to audiences.
Promoting on social channels like Instagram, Facebook, or Linkedin for example creates more engagement and less resistance than it would if it were through a direct bulk email approach.
This is not to say that outreach emails are a bad strategy. Outreach emails have been a long-standing approach that even Brian Dean and Neil Patel use to this very day.
It all depends on how you craft your message, and also, don’t limit yourself to just one approach when it comes to reaching out to companies, brands, and bloggers; hence the addition of social media.
To make sure you’re sending out high-quality outreach emails, be sure to look for free sample email templates or outreach samples you can use as a great starting point.
Building backlinks with a blogger outreach strategy
Whether you’re building backlinks or guest posting, always choose websites and blog content to share that’s trusted, reliable, and relevant to your niche/business/brand.
In this section, we’ll cover some of the best practices to follow when it comes to your blogger outreach strategy.
1. Keep testing and research diligently
There’s no such thing as getting it right the first time. Treat every outreach method as an experiment of learning what works best and what garners results for your business.
Things like how you pitch to clients/bloggers, the types of bloggers you reach out to, and what you say in your pitches are all methods you can continually improve throughout the outreach process.
Research is part of everything you do because it’s valuable information you can use that defines whether your pitch will garner a partnership or rejection letter.
2. Nurture your relationships
Wouldn’t it be sad to watch companies and brands treat relationships as a sole means to an end?
Sadly, we’ve seen several companies implement the best practices at the start, but when the oasis runs dry, anything best practice-related has either turned into non-existent or worst practice.
It’s one thing to craft an engaging sales pitch, but it’s another to maintain a loyal community of followers or subscribers to your brand. Relationships are about driving deep connections from start to finish.
3. Personalize your pitch
Email templates are fun to use, but you also want to be careful you don’t end up sending the same generic email to every blogger and client on your list.
Why? Because a high degree of personalization is what’s going to help you win over those VIP bloggers you’ve dreamed of working with.
Here’s a list of things you should include in your email pitch:
- Blogger’s name
- Your website
- A brief description of what you do as a brand and your brand’s personality
- Why you want to work with them and why your content or what you’re offering is a good fit
- What’s in it for them or what can they receive in return
- Your request (don’t ask for huge wins, but rather small commitments. You don’t want to do any hard selling of any kind)
4. Use a variety of tools
We mentioned blog outreach tools earlier; however, a successful outreach strategy can also benefit from a good variety of tools such as:
- SEO tools – helps you find high domain authority sites and any relevant websites (Examples: Ahrefs, Moz, SEMRush, Alexa)
- Email finder tools – useful for your outreach email campaign and who to reach out to first when you’re just starting out (Examples: Hunter.io, Voila Norbert, Snov.io)
- Outreach tools – used to find relevant bloggers in your niche and track your emails. You can also set the preferred metrics when choosing which blogs or sites you want to reach out to and filter your search preferences based on those metrics. (Examples: Buzzstream, NinjaOutreach, Mailshake, and Pitchbox)
Why use tools? Doesn’t it add up to all the costs?
Sure, it might add up to your costs, but when you’re managing a website, business, complex workflows, and a team to create the content, it’s hard to track all your outreach campaigns manually.
We’re not saying you need to use every and all tool possible. Using just one tool from each of the tools listed above is more than enough.
5. Know when you should outsource
As your business grows, even the best tools and practices won’t always be enough to keep up with how fast you’re expanding. For some businesses even, it’s not possible to do outreach campaigns all on their own.
This is when you should consider outsourcing to agencies or outreach services to handle all the heavy lifting for you. A few of the best blogger outreach agencies include:
- Marketer’s Center
- OutreachMama
- Fat Joe
- Stellar SEO
- Outreach Solutions
- No BS
The best part of using blogger outreach agencies? They combine guest posting and outreach campaigns to maximize link building results for your business. Some even offer a content creation service PLUS a skyscraper marketing service!
Take note; however, that every agency offers different packages so it’s worth spending some time doing your research on which agency fits your business’ needs best.
How to scale your outreach efforts with outreach tools
Scaling your outreach efforts with outreach tools starts by learning which tools are the right fit for each stage of your outreach campaign. There are 3 phases to take note of:
- Prospecting stage – Finding bloggers and relevant websites to your niche. A successful outreach campaign depends on finding the right bloggers that help your business grow.
- Reaching out stage – Enter the power of email. But not just any generic email. Personalization matters in this stage and even more so, automated email features shave off all the manual bulk work you have to do.
- Managing and maintaining relationships stage – Even after a successful email pitch, it doesn’t end there. You have to continually build relationships and maintain those relationships in good standing.
Prospecting stage
When it comes to finding prospects or relevant bloggers to reach out to, we recommend using BuzzSumo or Klear.
BuzzSumo allows you to:
- Find influencers and brands by industry – If you belong in the food niche, a blogger from the beauty niche isn’t going to help your business grow, right? This BuzzSumo feature allows you to filter these out so you can choose the right bloggers for your niche and reach out to them.
- Find top-performing content – Backlinking is one of the strongest ranking factors, but so is content. Finding top-performing content allows you to improve your content marketing strategy and curate a list of content pieces or articles you can use as inspiration to create top-notch content.
- Filter your search by location – What if you want to specifically target one location? BuzzSumo allows you to easily do that!
Klear is just as powerful when it comes to finding contacts in your niche and sorting those contacts to make it easier for you to manage each and every contact on your list.
Now, how does that help you?
Imagine having 30 Google tabs open and endlessly scrolling through page after page on Google just to find websites and bloggers you can reach out to? That doesn’t even include all the notes you’ll have to jot down: email address, follows, and blogger-related information.
Sounds like a mess right?
Klear takes all that time you spend manually and crunches it into a 3-step process:
- Choose your niche
- Find thousands of bloggers and contacts in your niche
- Manage your list of contacts and bloggers
Simple, right? That’s precisely why outreach tools exist.
Reaching out stage and managing and maintaining relationships stage
Pitchbox and Traackr are great tools to use when reaching out to your contacts and managing your relationships. You can also opt for all-in-one email outreach platforms like SmartReach and Woodpecker.
With Pitchbox, the entire blogger outreach process becomes less tedious and time-consuming, allowing you to focus more of your time on building connections with the right bloggers/influencers in your niche. Here’s what Pitchbox can do for your business:
- Find prospects in your niche including contact info, website URL, social media accounts, and more
- Personalize each outreach with the help of templates and improve your response rates
- Manage all your emails under one app to keep your outreach emails organized
- Use automated tools to stay in touch and follow up on clients (Most deals take more than one email or message to close, so having automated features can save you the trouble of writing email after email after email for every client/prospect)
- Performance reports to help you identify what’s working, what isn’t, and what you need to improve in your outreach campaign
One thing to note about Pitchbox, though is it takes a little more time to get used to considering all the features it offers. Nevertheless, Pitchbox is a powerful tool worth using for all your outreach needs.
Traackr also has similar features as Pitchbox to find key influencers or prospects and manage those relationships. However, there’s one unique feature that drew us in: you can track how each relationship you’ve built impacts your business.
That means you have the ability to tweak and improve your approach so your efforts don’t go to waste and improve your chances of success. Finally, Traackr scores each influencer by relevance and reach so you can organize your list of contacts with ease, making it perfect if you’re new to the outreach process.
