How To Do Blogger Outreach

The best business owners know when to keep tasks for themselves and when the right time is to outsource to team members or external partners. However, no matter what they designate for other people, the recommendation is always to be aware of what is happening. Sometimes, this means being involved in meetings; other times, it consists of signing off on projects. Occasionally, it means researching more about a particular practice, such as your SEO and link building. As these areas can make a huge difference in online visibility for your business, it would benefit you to know more about each element that goes on behind the scenes to ensure you have a clear understanding of it. SEO and link building can take some time to learn, so it is handy to know what areas you should prioritize first. In this case, blogger outreach is a good starting point.

This guide will provide a detailed look into this link building strategy, including a description, the approaches involved, and the best practices. All of this information will benefit you whether you are running your own link building campaigns, getting your internal team to do so, or outsourcing the entire workload, as you will know exactly why and how it works.

Let’s jump right in by answering the first question you likely have: What is blogger outreach?

Blogger outreach is a marketing strategy that is all about making and building strategic relationships with bloggers and webmasters to achieve an end goal. It is commonly used for link building campaigns to help businesses boost their backlink profile with guest posts, but it can also be great for SEO in general when it comes to promoting new content.

It can be extremely valuable for influencer marketing, PR strategies, and developing partnerships. Once you find the right webmasters and influencers to work with, whatever your goal is, blogger outreach provides an opportunity that benefits both you and the other website.

When seeking these bloggers, there are several steps involved:

• Suitability
• Finding contact information
• Segmentation

We will go through each of these below.

Identify Suitable Bloggers

The first step in blogger outreach involves identifying who is the most suitable for you. You want to find highly relevant webmasters who aren’t competitors. After all, a competitor won’t want to promote you, just like you wouldn’t them if it was the other way around. Therefore, you want to find closely related markets and industries.

For instance, if you are a business selling bathroom renovation services, you can reach out to real estate websites, home improvement sites, parenting blogs, interior design blogs, and home décor sites.

By targeting these markets, you are confident that your audiences are very similar and will find what you’re offering relevant but won’t cause any concern to the bloggers that you’ll be taking away their audiences.

As well as relevancy in terms of audiences, you will also want to identify the size of each one for every website you are considering contacting. A much larger audience means a higher chance of getting more brand awareness. If this audience is also highly engaged, even better. When it comes to actually finding these suitable bloggers, you can take three approaches:

• Use BuzzSumo – To find the best influencers, type a seed keyword into the search bar.
• Use Ahrefs’ Content Explorer – Choose a keyword, enter it into the search, and find results that display this keyword. Filter it down to language, first published, and one page per domain to make your life even easier.
• Google it – This final approach is a much more time-consuming task but handy for those who are working with a limited budget. Enter your keywords in the search engine and see what comes up. Chances are, at first, competitors, but you might be surprised at who else shows up who is highly relevant to you.

Find Bloggers’ Contact Information

Once you’ve identified who you want to target, you want to find their contact information. Sometimes, you’ll find this information on their website. Check out their Contact Us page as a first port of call. If you can’t see an email, it’s time to move on and do one of these methods:

• Utilize Email Finder – This handy tool allows you to discover the email addresses of any potential bloggers when all you know is their name and URL.
• Search for authors using Author Finder – All you have to do is enter the URL into this search bar, and it will bring up their email address, name, company, and job title within seconds. Plus, it will display the public sources in which the email was originally mentioned.

With both methods, you can get everything you need in bulk thanks to their handy automation systems. This is perfect if you are stretched for time or don’t want the laborious job.

Segment Your List

Now that you have your contact information, you want to separate all you have found into different categories. This is because when the time comes to reach out to these contacts, you want to make your emails as personalized as possible. Some possible categories you could have include:

• Job position – This could mean splitting them up into celebrities, industry leaders, emerging bloggers, micro-influencers, or macro-influencers.
• Niche – Put together any websites that are of a similar nature, such as real estate blogs or home décor blogs.
• DA – Categorize the websites based on their DA ratings. Compile all the DA 30+ while making another list for the DA50+. The latter will be harder to secure a guest post on, so distinguishing them enables you to approach it the right way.
• Resources – If you were drawn to a certain number of websites because of the resources on their page, put them together in a category. Doing so will help you later down the line when forming emails.

You have to be realistic when it comes to getting responses from bloggers – don’t just aim for celebrities and industry leaders or all the high-ranking DAs. There’s a higher chance that they won’t respond to you, and, as a result, you could be missing out on still very good relationships instead. Likewise, don’t aim only at the lower-rated ones. Getting the balance is critical.

When you start to look at how to do blogger outreach, you’ll discover there’s not just one way. There are several approaches you can take. These are the sniper approach and the shotgun approach.

• The Sniper Approach

Aptly named the sniper approach because of the precision and time you take, this involves manually sending very personalized emails out to your contacts. With this approach, you must be more careful in choosing who you target. For instance, you only want to reach out to those of high quality, with better authority and credibility, who are more likely interested in your offering than lower quality sites that take everything, no matter its relevancy. While getting a link on a lower-quality site might be easier, it will never benefit you, so don’t waste your time crafting an email using this approach. When you have your carefully crafted list, you won’t be using a template to email them. Instead, you will be writing out a very personalized email that clearly shows you have taken the time to learn as much about them as possible beyond just their name and why you love what they do. If you can provide examples, this is a fantastic way to draw them in. It shows that you’ve been attentive to what they do.

• The Shotgun Approach

Unlike the sniper approach, this will see you targeting as many websites as possible. The other difference is how you write the emails. You won’t make these personalized. You don’t take the time to make them as engaging, either. For all the websites you contact, you’ll be sending the same base template message. Those you are sending this out to will recognize when it is a template vs. a more personalized message – remember, they will see a lot of daily emails and are experts at spotting when the shotgun approach has been used compared to the sniper. So, in what scenario would you use this? Well, if you are looking to do outreach on a huge scale, this is perfect. If you are a little more pressed for time or have a tighter budget, again, this could be the ideal approach for you. It just needs to come with a word of warning. The problem with this approach is that you won’t necessarily be able to secure those high-authority sites.

Get On Bloggers’ Radar Before Reaching Out

Now that you know the main two approaches to blogger outreach emailing, there are several other important things to know before you jump straight in. The first is that it can benefit you to prep before emailing. What we mean by this is making yourself known a bit more by webmasters, bloggers, and influencers. You won’t be the only one reaching out to them. In fact, they will likely receive hundreds of thousands of emails from businesses, SEO teams, marketers, and individuals all vying for a guest post spot or any form of collaboration. As a result, they will only be able to reply to a handful – these will be the ones that grab their attention or are sent by people they know or are at least familiar with. So, how can you become a well-known presence to bloggers and webmasters alike? You can do the following tactics:

• Contact them without an agenda – You do have an agenda, of course, to get on their radar, but the first email you send them should not ask for anything from them. Share feedback, let them know if they have a typo or a broken link in their content, or offer some friendly tips that could assist them in content creation. Just make sure it isn’t patronizing, and you could make a great impression on them.
• Leave a comment on their blog – This shows you’re interested in their content and gives you a great opening to your email to say you’ve read this and loved it.
• Engage with them on social media – This is so easy to do and grants you more exposure to potential customers as well as those desired influencers. Simply respond to a post, leave a comment, or share their content with your followers.

Craft Your Pitch

Once you’ve made attempts at standing out in front of your desired targets, it’s time to write out your email. If you are choosing the shotgun approach, you need to write out a template that contains the following:

• Non-personalized subject line.
• Opening line with no personalization – e.g., hey there, hi, hello, followed by no name.
• Introduce yourself and your company to show the value you are offering.
• Request a link from them.

Most emails following this won’t be very engaging, but some bloggers might respond to it.

If you are opting for the sniper approach, remember the key here is personalization throughout, starting with the subject line. It needs to be short, showing that you are getting to the point and not wasting their time – this is what should capture their attention first. When creating the main body of text, always open the email by including their name. Then, follow this up with a good reference, such as something they are interested in. This is the time to tell them what you have of value before including a section about what you love about their content. Keep it honest – don’t tell them you loved something if you didn’t. Anything that is disingenuous will come across. Remember, they’ve seen it all before. When you’ve done this, you can then request a link.

Send Follow-ups

You’ve spent time crafting the perfect emails to your desired targets, but they still haven’t responded. Nor have they posted your guest post or engaged with you in any format. You have two options here: move on to the next target and find ways you can better engage them via email, or you can follow up with another email. Doing so can double your response rates. It might be the case that your blogger missed your email or forgot to respond – it happens. We are only human. However, it could be that your first email wasn’t very clear in what you were asking of them. By following up with another email, you are reminding them of your presence or helping them understand what you are seeking from them. There is a limit on how many you should send. If you have sent three emails and still have not had a response, it is time to move on. You risk damaging your brand and being associated as spammy.

Now that you know the main approaches, it’s time to become familiar with the best practices for blogger outreach. These include:

• Identifying your goals – What do you want blogger outreach to achieve for you? More backlinks? More exposure? Establishing this helps direct the campaign, so it is one of the most important practices you can do.
• Finding your contacts and choosing carefully – Who you connect with matters to the results you get in the end, so make sure as part of your campaign, you are only ever carefully selecting relevant, high-authority websites.
• Writing high-quality content – Audiences and Google alike love quality content, so make it a priority when conducting blogger outreach.
• Drafting a clear pitch (personalized if choosing the sniper approach) – You want a professional, clear pitch explaining why you are contacting them, with suggestions on topics, how you can help them, what you love about their site, and more.
• Build relationships – Follow websites on social media and interact with their content,posts, and more to make yourself familiar with them. Continue this after you’ve reached out via email.
• Following up – Following up on any emails not answered can help you secure more links. Sometimes, emails get missed, and other times forgotten. A gentle reminder never hurts anybody.
• Monitoring metrics – To improve your campaigns, you need to have benchmarks and metrics that you are monitoring. Make sure to set these up and refer back to them to see your progress.

If you would still prefer to leave this to the SEO experts, you won’t be alone in doing so. Lots of businesses turn to agencies like our own to conduct their blogger outreach, and it has benefitted them. Contact us today to get started.