An effective blogger outreach strategy is key if you want to boost your online presence, get more traffic, and drive growth.
However, a too broad approach can seem spammy, generic - and, worst of all, fake. Following the same-old pattern would be a complete waste of time and potential.
You must craft your strategy to match up-to-date needs to stand out from the masses and reach the target audience without mixed signals. Mind you, the same approach hardly ever applies to two different niches.
Read on if you're looking to improve your blog outreach strategy with battled tested tips.
Why Is Blogger Outreach Important?
If you run a business that involves a website, there's simply no excuse not to invest in blogger outreach. Getting out there and connecting with prominent bloggers can help you in many ways, such as:
- Earning new backlinks
- Raising awareness of your brand
- Promoting your existing content
- Landing guest blogging opportunities
Blogger Outreach Statistics To Consider In 2022
The following stats about blog outreach may help you understand its significance in today’s highly competitive landscape:
- Marketing teams that prioritize blogging are 13 times more likely to get a positive return on investment (ROI).
- Roughly 53% of marketing teams say that blogger outreach is their primary area of focus regarding content marketing.
- Businesses with a regularly updated blog can get up to 97% more website links.
- Up to 77% of Internet users report reading blogs regularly - and 46% of them will consider recommendations from bloggers.
The New Outlook On Blogger Outreach Strategy
Before we can get into the topic of putting together a blogger outreach strategy and launching your first campaign, there is one thing we need to address first:
Your outlook on the blogger outreach process.
It’s not about gathering a bunch of email addresses and sending a ton of generic emails to the relevant websites in your niche out of the blue.
That's a selfish way to look at blogger outreach and one that won’t give you any actual results or help you build relationships with these influential bloggers.
Blogger Outreach Is A Two-Way Street
Try to understand that your influencer marketing campaign is a partnership - a "symbiosis" between your brand and the influencers in your niche.
But that’s the thing:
Your goals are likely different than theirs.
For you, it might be about increasing your visibility in search engines, brand exposure, or even getting some quality backlinks from websites with high domain authority.
But what’s in it for them?
That’s the question you should be asking here.
While this will be a joint effort, you will work on achieving different goals. And you must understand that.
The harsh truth is:
These high-quality blogs don’t owe you anything.
Blogger outreach is a two-way street. You give - and you get in return.
And the sooner you realize that and start treating it as such, the sooner you'll begin seeing the results of your influencer marketing strategy.
Each blogger outreach campaign consists of several phases. We'll deconstruct and explain each one below.
Prospecting: The Search For The Right Bloggers
A successful outreach campaign starts with prospecting - a process where you find the relevant bloggers in the niche and vet them using a set of parameters.
When talking about link building, you can generally find outreach prospects using one of the following techniques:
Guest posting - Reaching out to relevant bloggers who accept contributions
Link roundups - Reaching out to prominent websites in the niche to get included in their daily/weekly/monthly roundup
Skyscraper technique - Creating an article or a page that will cover the topic in the niche the best and targeting pages that link to similar lower-quality articles
Broken link building - Targeting pages that contain broken links
Resource page link building - Building a resource page and reaching out to websites that
Unlinked mentions - Targeting sites that mentioned you but didn't link to your website
The first step is to start with a longer list. Blogs, podcasts, vlogs, digital content creators - there is enough room for all the relevant names in your industry.
However, make sure to narrow it down based on the three main criteria:
Relevance: Is the content they produce relevant to your brand and target audience?
Influence: How influential are they? (More influence = harder to accept your pitch)
Opportunity: Are they open to featuring guest posts and collaborating with brands?
If you are struggling with building the prospect list for your outreach campaign, here are a few tactics that can help you find bloggers and new guest post opportunities:
Google SERP Scraping
This method is simple, doesn’t require you to use advanced tools, and is completely free, too.
All it takes is a Google search.
How do you use search engine results page (SERP) scraping?
Choose a seed keyword that is relevant to your niche.
Enter your keyword into the search bar - and see what comes up.
Some good examples to start with are:
Best sites + “niche”
Top influencers + “niche”
Best blogs + “niche”
These three queries alone could bring you hundreds of potential prospects.
Here's an example:
Then, all that is left to do is to create a spreadsheet with all the info.
Here's an example of an outreach spreadsheet:
Email extractors like Hunter.io, for example, can help you find these websites' email addresses.
That said, be sure to verify that these emails are, indeed, active - or you might end up with not-so-great open rates.
Ahrefs Content Explorer
Ahrefs - one of the most popular link-building tools to date - offers quite a few solutions that can help you find potential prospects.
Ahrefs’ Content Explorer, for example, lets you access tons of prospecting information - based on a single seed keyword.
That’s not all, though.
Besides the exhaustive lists of pages that rank for the chosen seed keyword, Content Explorer shows you the top authors and lets you filter the results based on other factors - like language, publication date, and website platform.
Once you’ve chosen the most relevant pages, you can plug each one into the Site Explorer tool, and you’ll be able to see all the referring domains - websites that currently link to those pieces of content.
Talk about prospecting on steroids!
Pitching: Write A Quality Pitch
Your pitch is what should ideally make the bloggers say “Yes” to you. Then again, it could also ruin your chances of establishing a working relationship.
Remember:
Authority bloggers are fed up with out-of-the-blue campaign pitches. In fact, they ignore most of the emails they receive.
An astounding fact is that more than 293 billion emails are sent daily.
Who has time to read all that?
Your emails must be concise and to the point to increase your chances of success - rather than getting lost somewhere in the recipient’s inbox.
So, how do you become worthy of the "read" status - or, better yet, a reply?
The three fundamental elements of a good outreach email are the subject line, personalization, and value:
Subject Lines
A good pitch starts with the attention-grabbing subject lines. That's your chance to stand out in the influencer’s already-full inbox and create curiosity - hopefully enough for them to open your email.
Here's a fact that proves our point:
Personalizing the subject line of an outreach email will increase the odds of getting a response by as much as 33%.
Of course, no universal subject line will work across the board.
Here's a neat trick from Alex Gaines, the PR Manager at Three Ships:
"One thing I do a lot is if I’m pitching someone something related to an article they wrote, I always use their headline in my subject line. Kind of an old trick, but it usually will grab attention because it’s recognizable."
Personalization
The second vital ingredient of a successful blogger outreach pitch that should get you one step closer to getting a response from the bloggers you reach out to is the actual email.
Write a personalized email - something that pops in an inbox full of identical, copy-paste ones.
Or, as Haley Fraser, Director of Brand & Content at Pixlee TurnTo, puts it:
"Cold outreach emails that speak to our goals and audience tend to receive the most attention from our team. An email that is tailored to our audience of influencer marketing leaders shows that the author did research before reaching out, and helps establish trust faster than a generic email."
Address the blogger by name, and mention a specific detail or two you read on their latest article (or even one from a while ago). Introduce your opinion on the matter rather than just praising.
It shows you care - and that maybe, they should care, too.
Cathy Dawiskiba, Chief Marketing Officer at Woodpecker.co, agrees:
"They won’t care if you don’t show them you actually care – that’s why being authentic in your outreach is the key."
Value
Your content marketing efforts will likely crumble if your outreach email doesn’t include some kind of incentive - something that adds value to them.
You can’t ask them to do something for you - and offer nothing in return. That’s not even a matter of how a good blogger outreach campaign works.
It’s a matter of common decency.
So, it’s time to ask yourself:
What’s in it for them? Why should they accept your offer?
They won't take action if you can't give them a strong incentive.
Here's what Adam Enfroy, Founder of AdamEnfroy.com, says on the matter:
"Links are a value exchange – you can’t ask for a link or a guest post without offering something of value in return. It just doesn’t make sense. Can you offer a link back to them in another separate guest post? A social share to your audience? You need to offer something that you’d want yourself."
Pitching Do’s & Don’ts
Knowing just enough to be dangerous is keenly relevant when it comes to this.
While there are several SEO mistakes you can make, taking advice from others who have failed and then succeeded is the key to learning faster.
To do our part, we already outlined the fundamental principles of writing a good pitch for blogger outreach - but there is more we’d like to add.
Here are a couple of things to avoid:
DON’T copy email sequence templates word for word. Thousands of others already use them; there is nothing that would make you stand out. They can serve as an inspiration - but do not copy the template word for word.
DON’T make it too complicated. Initiate a conversation with a simple request and a clear call to action (CTA).
DON’T be generic. The generic approach won't cut it or help you reach key influencers. It gives an impression that you sent the same outreach email to all the other bloggers and authority sites.
DON’T be pushy. These people have the right to say “No” to your proposal. If they do, you have no choice but to accept the negative response and move on.
Outreach: Launching Your Campaign
By now, you likely have an idea of who you want to contact and what you have to offer - and you’ve hopefully gathered the correct contact details.
That means it is time to get the ball rolling - and start building relationships.
You have two options at this point:
Manual outreach
Automated blogger outreach tools
Manual outreach sounds great in theory. You're not required to spend a dime on automated tools - and yet you still get to achieve the same results.
But is that really the case?
Finding prospects and reaching out manually takes a lot of time. And if that time is better spent elsewhere, one could argue that it’s not free.
On the other hand, there are solutions that will help you manage blogger outreach effectively.
BuzzStream, for example, features an all-in-one digital toolkit - a compilation of link-building tools that can help you navigate every aspect of your campaign.Staying Organized
Once you launch your campaign, you’ll be juggling hundreds of different prospects and dozens of ongoing conversations. In other words:
Keeping track of everything that's going on will be anything but easy.
One way to stay organized - even when things get hectic - is to rely on Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software. Salesforce, for example, can help keep track of all your outreach efforts.
If you don’t have access to such software, an expanded Excel Spreadsheet (example from above) will do.
The key is to keep track of who you’ve contacted, when, who responded to your email, and whether you’ve received a positive response.
Content Creation: Creating Authority Blog-Friendly Content
Everything you’ve done so far will pretty much be in vain if you fail to create content for your blogger outreach campaign.
That ties in with the point we made earlier when discussing incentives:
Your content is the value you’re bringing to the table.
Blog owners and influencers have a reputation to uphold here - and mediocre content won't do the trick. However, if you can offer them a high-quality, up-to-date, and well-researched piece of content, they will want to share it.
If content creation isn't one of your strongest suits, that's fine. Just hire a copywriter who can do that for you.
One of the easiest ways to do that is by researching your main competitors:
Browse through the content published on their sites, find a blog post or two that stands out to you - and see who wrote them. You can then look these copywriters up on LinkedIn and get in touch.
Writing The Article
At this point, you’ve been told numerous times how crucial it is to produce high-quality SEO-optimized content in line with Google’s E-A-T (Expertise, Authority, and Trustworthiness) criteria.
But how does that look in practice?
Obviously, there is more to this than putting together a 500-word article, slapping on a link or two to high-authority sites and a link to your website - and calling it a day. That will not earn you any traffic or social media shares - let alone support your link-building efforts.
Here are some tips for writing high-quality blog posts:
Take the time to get to know your audience. When you know who you’re writing for, it's easier to identify the topics they’re interested in.
Show your expertise and authority on the matter. Do your research and back up the claims with evidence, including links to credible resources.
Create a catchy post title - without sounding "click-batey," of course.
Keep your structure simple and easy to digest. Break it up into subheadings, write shorter paragraphs, use bullet point lists, emphasize specific points in bold or italics, and break up the content with visuals. Use either Hemingway App or Grammarly Premium to spot formatting mistakes to correct.
The word count plays a surprisingly important role here:
According to recent statistics, articles that are 1,000-3,000 words long tend to acquire 77.2% more links than articles with a maximum of 1,000 words.
That said, you should never aim for quantity over quality.
If a topic can be covered in 500 words, there is no need to stretch it to more than 2,000 words.
Concise and concentrated is the way to go.
Here’s what Jason Chow of WebRevenue says on the matter:
A common misconception among some site owners is that they can get away with lower-quality guest posts. However, remember that the quality of your guest posts reflects on you. Well-written and engaging content will attract more readers and, potentially, new incoming links. You can reap overall rewards that far surpass simply getting a link from a single website.
Importance Of Link Placement
Link placement is a crucial - although sometimes overlooked - aspect of content creation and link-building.
Studies show that the first ranking site on Google's SERPs has an average of 3.8x more backlinks compared to those in positions from 2 to 10. So, don't hesitate to include a few more links - as long as they work with your content.
Content Promotion: Tracking Performance & Maximizing Results
Congrats, your content is getting published!
You can breathe a sigh of relief - the finish line is in sight. However, you're not quite done yet.
Promote Your Guest Posts
The bloggers you collaborate with already have a loyal following across multiple social media platforms. And while you might still be working on establishing your online presence, the chances are you do, too.
Now’s the time to share your guest post across social media channels.
Track Your Performance
You’ve reached out to relevant bloggers, made all these new connections - and even managed to secure a certain number of guest posts. You seem to be doing great, right?
Don’t forget why you’re doing all this:
Your primary goal was to get more traffic and earn quality backlinks from websites with high domain authority - not meet new people.
It's obvious when we put it like that, sure. But if you forget to track the performance of your recently published posts, it will be difficult - if not impossible - to tell whether your campaign is working or not.
There are many software solutions - outreach management systems - to help you out:
Groove
Salesloft
Outreach
Reply
Mixmax
Cirrus Insight.
ClearSlide.
Marketo Sales Connect
GMass
Their value is truly exponential, as they help you track your email opens, responses, correspondence with each prospect, and link placements. If you're serious about blogger outreach, you'll start using one of these.
Your Ticket To A Successful Blogger Outreach Campaign
Now that you have all the tools and helpful tips to excel at every part of the outreach process, it’s time to apply them in real life.
And once you do, you will find out how quickly your marketing strategy is improved with adequate outreach tools.
First, you'll need to change your outlook on blogger outreach. Find partners rather than ask for favors, and open doors for others - not just yourself.
Then create relevant, high-quality content - and amplify your results by promoting it on social media to get the most out of your outreach and guest posts.
Finally, with the right tools for email outreach and prospecting, as discussed here, every marketing strategy you create will be a sure success.
With these tips and tricks in your pocket, you are on the right track to generating more traffic and engaging a relevant audience.