What Is Blogger Outreach?

SEO is one of the best marketing techniques that you could use to improve your online presence, grow your traffic, and improve your reputation. Of the many SEO campaigns you can do, blogger outreach is one of the most popular. This guide is here to help you understand more about the types of blogger outreach, benefits, and best practices you can do, starting with providing you with an answer to what blogger outreach is.

Blogger outreach is classed as a marketing strategy with the purpose of helping businesses come into contact with new audiences and, in general, improve their SEO. How this works is simple. You build relationships through personalized emails with bloggers, journalists, web admins, and social media influencers so that they will post about your content or products/services to their audiences. Even just including a link to your website within a blog post on their site can be beneficial to you.

The key difference between blogger outreach strategies and sending spam emails is how you approach the email. Blogger outreach helps maintain a professional approach that enables you to build relationships with those most influential in your industry. Each email you produce with a blogger outreach mindset will be highly personal to your recipient so that you stand a chance at securing the spot over your competitors and gaining new traffic to your site. However, there are two main approaches you can take with this that both yield results. There is the sniper approach and the shotgun. The former involves sending carefully crafted emails, personalized down to the fine degree, while the latter involves a little less focus on personalization, instead purpose designed to appeal to the masses.

Regardless of which approach you settle with, there is no reason that you have to struggle to figure out whether you are doing the right thing. Instead, you can recruit the help of a Blogger Outreach team that can handle every aspect of this. Whether you choose to do it yourself or seek help, it is worth knowing the following about blogger outreach.

Blogger outreach isn’t a singular entity. There are different types within this that companies can use. The variety ensures that no matter what size your budget is, you can find a way forward that works for you. Plus, the different types ensure that you can always keep your blogger outreach strategy fresh and evolving.

There are four main types of blogger outreach:

• Link building
• Content partnerships
• Email outreach
• Social media

When implemented correctly, you could see a significant shift in your online traffic, engagement, awareness, and credibility. Learning more about each of these types can help you best place your budget – some types might suit specific business needs. For example, if you want to better connect with audiences, a social media outreach approach would be a recommended course of action, but if you want to boost your SEO rankings, link building would be better. Below, you’ll find more details about each type that can help you learn more about what you might be better off starting with.

• Link Building

What is outreach link building? This type of outreach involves contacting relevant influencers or bloggers to build up your profile of backlinks as naturally as possible. As backlinks are a ranking factor for the most dominant search engine, Google, link building is a popular choice for businesses. The results you could enjoy include a better search engine ranking, more traffic, and improved brand authority.

If you can’t wait to get started on link building, the recommendation is to reach out to experts offering Link Building services. However, this is what a link building outreach strategy looks like:

Identify Your Targets: Uncover which relevant websites will be suitable to host a backlink.

Create Guest Post Content: Have great quality content ready to send to the chosen contacts.

Build Up The Right Relationships: Communicate via email to build budding relationships, making sure to be as personal, engaging, and honest as possible.

Offer Value: During exchanges, it’s time to offer value to the recipient. Often, this is the high-quality content produced earlier.

Follow Up: Relationships need sustaining, so keeping up with contact is vital. If no response has been received, following up could also help secure another link opportunity.

• Content Partnerships

Content is very valuable for SEO, making it worthwhile for businesses to focus a good portion of their marketing budget. One refreshing way to go about content is to consider venturing down the content partnerships route that blogger outreach offers. With this, you can partner up with another business, connect with them, and then create and share content. Both of you put the work in to improve your online visibility and get exposed to new audiences and markets. However, it is so popular because of its tailored nature. Working directly with another partner means you can produce campaigns that are made specifically for your audience. With this, you might choose to go down the guest posting route – you could write content for them and include your link. They get great content for their audience, and you get exposure.

Similar to link building, your campaign starts by finding and creating a list of potential contacts – the partners you want to work with. When you send emails, ensure you make it clear what value you could bring them and how they could help you. Make suggestions on what route you would like to go down, such as guest posting, and see what they say. Over time, you can develop this relationship.

• Email Outreach

Getting a response from bloggers and site owners isn’t as easy as it sounds. The reality is that not everyone is going to respond. Whether it is because they are flooded with emails and have missed it or nothing about what you offer stands out, those first few emails you send out likely won’t get a response. This is why a lot of businesses, when first starting blogger outreach, opt for this type.

The purpose is to strike up initial conversations with those you want to build relationships with. Instead of diving in with suggestions about what they can do for you, you reach out to get to know them and let them get to know you. It is the perfect foundation for lead generation, promoting content, and link building. You need to make each email personal – bloggers will know when you’ve used a template vs. been personable. With this, you’ll have to follow up a lot, but emailing more than three times isn’t recommended. Once you have built up a good relationship, you can enquire about whether they could help you.

Remember, SEO agencies will have already spent the time doing email outreach to build up relationships – it won’t delay link building efforts. Therefore, if you don’t want to spend time or budget doing email outreach, it might be worth reaching out to experts instead.

• Social Media

Social media outreach differs a lot from the other three types already mentioned for the sole reason that you are using social media as your platform of choice to communicate and connect with your target audience. However, with this, you have to be careful. You must be authentic with how you interact online. Yes, you want to promote your content or branding, but you want to focus more on building those relationships instead. With this, you spend the time responding to comments and messages, answering questions and providing support for your audience to boost engagement. In addition, you could try influencer collaboration, where you work on sponsored posts, product reviews, and social media takeovers. You could also put yourself in touch with customers to encourage user-generated content, such as reviews, photos, videos, blogs, and comments. Other tactics you might try include hosting webinars or posting reports that include statistics you’ve uncovered yourself.

To get started, follow the below steps:

• Decide on your objective
• Make a list of influencers/people most interested in your brand
• Get your own profile ready
• Engage with your list of prospects
• Reach out with requests

There are multiple benefits of introducing blogger outreach to your overall marketing campaign. The top benefit (and one that usually attracts most businesses) is their SEO rankings can improve but in a cost-effective way. This can bring new volumes of traffic and boost brand visibility. What further promotes the use of blogger outreach is that it can enhance online credibility. When all of these start to improve and you get new audiences coming across your brand, you should then find that you can drive up conversions and sales. Go down the social media outreach direction, and you’ll also find that your exposure expands. You can see significant improvements in your engagement, which could further boost the traffic to your website. If you put enough work in, you might even go viral!

By working on blogger outreach strategies, you’ll be forming long-term partnerships that benefit both you and them.

One unexpected benefit is that you may actually get feedback and advice from bloggers that can help you improve your website, branding, or product/service. This could prove to be most insightful if you have been struggling to boost sales.

You naturally want your campaign to be a success, and while nothing is absolutely guaranteed, you can improve your prospects of succeeding by following the best practices. This starts with you setting your goals and objectives. If you don’t know what you want to achieve, how will you know whether the campaign has been a success? Once you know what you are looking to achieve, what are your benchmarks? Benchmarking is a critical practice for blogger outreach, as this is how you can measure your goals. With these two aspects handled, you can move on to the following:

• Forming your target prospect list: You only want to reach out to those most appropriate to your industry and market. Relevancy hugely matters to results, so you have to prioritize getting this list just right.
• Value: Next, think about what you are going to be offering to these targets. Will you be providing them with something worthwhile? This could be content, replacement links to fix broken ones, or free samples of your product in return for a review.
• Writing Personal Emails: When you know what to offer and who to offer it to, writing a personal email is the best practice you can implement, even down to the subject line.

Finally, don’t forget to follow up if you haven’t heard from targets, but more importantly, do if you have had a response – outreach is about forming these relationships. One email won’t cut it, so email them back and keep that conversation flowing. Put the work in, and the reward will be worth it.