When you hear the phrase “blogger outreach”, you start to imagine this monotonous and boring process of selling email pitches. You hate blogger outreach because it takes lots of time and effort. Plus, you will never know how many positive results you will get in return.
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Consequently, you are pretty sure that your target audience is already tired of receiving messages from you with another product or blog post promotion.
You experiment with email templates. You write various creative subject lines. Unfortunately, a response rate lives much to be desired.
Despite this fact, you must promote your service and raise brand awareness. Blogger outreach is a “must” tool for your entire marketing strategy.
How to save the situation?
This guide will teach you how to do blogger outreach more effectively by following five simple steps.
Are you ready to believe that blogger outreach is as easy as pie?
The Basics of Blogger Outreach
The first thing that you must do is to understand what blogger outreach is. Blogger outreach is the process of spreading the word about your product or service reaching out to your target audience via sending personalized emails.
Keep in mind that there is a fine line between personalized blogger outreach and spam outreach.
Both types of outreach consist of email templates, the first name of the person you’re reaching out to, and your desire to promote something.
Nevertheless, if spam outreach is all about sending pitches to anybody with the same approach, blogger outreach tends to reach out to certain people with a more personalized approach.
If spam outreach has more like a “cold” approach, blogger outreach can be divided into two approaches – shotgun and sniper outreach.
Blogger Outreach Approaches
As has been stated, there are two types of blogger outreach. Let’s review them.
1. Shotgun Outreach
Shotgun outreach can remind a kind of spam outreach. It is due to the number of messages sent. Basically, you don’t waste your time on personalization and stake on “scale” – the more messages you send, the more links you will get.
If you choose this type of outreach, you will have to send over 100 messages hoping to get 10 links in return.
However!
This approach has a few downsides.
- More chances that your messages will end up in a spam folder
- Forget about acquiring high-quality links
- Link prospects have a limit – don’t overuse all of them
2. Snipper outreach
Snipper outreach is based on sending super-personalized emails to a short number list of prospects. If you choose this method, you will have to work hard on the personalization of 10 emails hoping to get 5-7 links in return.
It is up to you which type of blogger outreach to choose. But if you think that quality is more valuable than quantity, the “sniper” approach should be your choice.
Now, let’s move to the process of blogger outreach itself.
How to Do Blogger Outreach in Five Steps
It doesn’t matter what type of approach you have chosen to use. The thing is that blogger outreach has the same step-by-step process regardless of the approach you use.
Blogger outreach consists of five main stages:
- Find the outreach targets
- Analyze the prospects and split them into segments
- Find the correct email addresses
- Create email outreach templates
- Run outreach + track the progress
1. Find the outreach targets
The first step you must take is to find outreach targets. It means you should work on surfing the web to find potential prospects who could give you a backlink.
It is the most time-consuming part of the entire blogger outreach process. Likely, if you know where to explore the opportunities, you won’t spend days at this stage of outreach.
Plus, by improving your skills, you will be able to find prospects on autopilot (how you will find out later in this post).
To save time follow these four suggestions on how to explore outreach opportunities:
a) Reach out to people featured in your content
When you create content, you refer to different third-party sources; you mention various influences, etc.
Why not let them know about this?
Keep it in mind and review your content after publishing whether there are mentions of some sources.
Afterward, reach out to them and introduce your piece of content where you refer to their writing material.
b) Find people who wrote content on the same topic
Go to Google and start searching for posts that would cover the same topic. You can be pretty sure that these people are interested in this topic. So, they might be interested in reviewing your point of view as well.
For instance, you have written a post that covers the “types of marketing collateral”. You know that this post can’t embrace all possible types of marketing collateral but it includes a few unique ones that only you are aware of. Hence, you need to find other posts on the same topic. And Google suggests these topics right off the bat.
To find the freshest content you should choose a recent date range.
The next step is to collect suggested posts and review them to find out what tips haven’t been featured there. Lastly, reach out to the authors and introduce your content.
c) Find people who linked to the posts with the same topic
Another actionable way to find prospects who would be interested in your piece of content is by reviewing competitors’ backlinks.
What does it mean?
It means you need to use some SEO tool that can analyze the backlink profile of whatever website you need. One such tool is Site Explorer from Ahrefs. Just grab the URLs you found on Google and analyze each of them with the tool. The report you need to review is “Backlinks”:
Check out the backlinks to the URL in question and reach out to each opportunity you explored.
2. Analyze the prospects and split them into segments
A well-prepared blogger outreach distinguishes the targets on the segment level. It means you won’t use the same email template and outreach approach contacting some influencer and junior marketing specialist at the same time.
As a result, you must split your outreach opportunities per segment. There are four main groups of:
- Spawn: These are the people who have just entered your business and have no loyal audience. They will likely reply to whatever email you send. Even if this email looks like spam.
- Small fish: These people have already earned some recognition in the business. They actively participate in different events, write guest posts, and do everything possible to boost their personal brand awareness. Since the representatives of this segment are aware of some email marketing tricks, they will reply to your message if it will be personalized.
- Big fish: These people already have a huge fan base and they can make an impact on your personal brand. If you want to reach out to them, you must create a perfect personalized email template. Don’t ask about a link or sharing. They won’t give it back to you. The best method to attract their attention is by asking them to criticize your content.
- Sharks: Your chance to reach out to these people is slim. It is not because they don’t know you. It is because they don’t have time to read emails. However, if you know how to attract their attention with something valuable, go ahead and try.
3. Find the correct email addresses
The next boring stage of blogger outreach is the process of finding email addresses. First and foremost – it is really time-consuming. Secondly, you won’t find a tool that could automate an email finding process (if we’re talking about finding correct emails).
Lots of email outreach specialists prefer using some email scraping tools. These tools suggest a list of all possible emails that would be related to a website domain you’re exploring. As a rule, the suggested emails are invalid most of the time.
Instead, you should better spend your time investigating the email’s validation more precisely.
Does it mean that you must review each outreach target’s profile on LinkedIn?
Yes.
Likely, if you can’t find one’s email address on LinkedIn, you can use a few tools for this purpose. Hunter.io and SalesQL (Chrome extension). Let’s review them.
Hunter.io
This tool finds emails easily but make sure you are using a “Finder” option instead of a “Search” one. The “Search” option suggests all emails that are associated with the website’s domain in question. The thing is that you will get email addresses that might not be already valid.
While the “Finder” option provides you with the email address of the exact person you are interested in.
Hunter.io – Get the e-mail address
A tool that automatically finds emails behind a domain and adds them to your email list for email marketing with features like CRM integrations and Chrome extension.
SalesQL
A Chrome extension that extracts emails right from outreach targets’ LinkedIn profiles.
It should be stated that both these tools can not find email addresses for some reason. Nevertheless, you will have more chances to get lucky using them.
4. Create email outreach templates
At this stage, you must take care of creating email templates for your blogger outreach campaigns.
There is no golden rule that would help you design email templates with a hundred percent open and reply rates. Hence, this example of the template can be workable and vice versa for you:
Hello {First Name},
I have just stumbled upon your post {title of the post}.
Awesome post!
I noticed you linked to {title of the post}. This post is great but I have written a better one on the same topic.
You can find it here {add a link to your post}
It would be great if you could link back to it.
Thanks,
Unfortunately, there are no feedback tools that could let you know if your email template is awesome or bad. You will find out after the email outreach campaign ends. The reply rate will let you know whether your email template works or not.
Remember that your email template should end up with something unique. Something that would pick the recipient’s attention.
Email template personalization is a kind of art where you must switch your imagination on and follow a few tips:
Catchy subject line
The first thing that we see when receiving an email is a subject line. If it doesn’t catch our attention, we won’t bother ourselves with opening the email.
So, what email subject line should include that would draw the recipient’s attention?
Nothing special but the exact reason you’re reaching out. If you tell what you want from the people you’re contacting, they more willingly reply back.
Don’t say fake compliments or say nothing at all
The major part of email personalization consists of fake compliments on something. Practice shows that if you send 50-100 emails per day, you won’t be reading each piece of content of your outreach targets. You can skim through the post to understand the main idea of it but you won’t read it from A to Z.
Therefore, either read the content completely and share your thoughts on it in the message, or don’t say anything.
Don’t forget to end your template with a call-to-action
Call-to-action doesn’t mean asking for a link. Your first pitch aims to start a conversation. While if you’re asking for a link, it might lead to acquiring a link or getting a rejection on this term.
Instead, you better ask to share the recipient’s opinion on the post you’re promoting with outreach. Believe it or not, people love when someone asks their opinion on something.
5. Run outreach + track the progress
Finally, you need to start your blogger outreach campaign. It might seem insane if you’re going to do it manually. Sending 100 pitches will take lots of your time and attention.
Likely, there is a plethora of various tools that help automate the process of outreach. One of them is Respona.
Respona – Build Backlinks
A link-building outreach tool designed for agencies to boost Google’s organic traffic.
The tool offers two ways of adding potential outreach targets. You can either choose Respona’s search engine or upload your CSV file. If you choose the first way, you will have to put your target keyword in a search bar. Afterward, Respona lists all the opportunities related to your inquiry (the same as Google):
Once you pick up outreach targets, you can create a customized email template:
Lastly, optimize each contact to your template and launch the campaign. What’s important, Respona, allows you to track the progress by reviewing a few stats:
If you have to run about 10 or more campaigns, you should hire a freelancer to delegate this process. Trust me, outreach is a very time-consuming process and you won’t be able to embrace it alone.
A Few Actionable Ways to Search for New Outreach Opportunities
Unfortunately, everything in our life has an end. The same happens to the prospects you are looking for. Especially if you target the freshest opportunities for the past month.
How to solve the problem?
Of course, you can monitor competitors’ social channels waiting for new blog post updates. Then use an old approach of exploring backlinks to these posts and then start your outreach.
This way is not the best solution in terms of time.
Why?
Because you will have to wait until these competitors’ blog posts go live. And you will have to use some social media monitoring tools for this purpose to be always up-to-date with content news.
Fortunately, you can automate content updates with the help of Google Alerts or Alerts from Ahrefs.
To set up Google Alerts, you will have to enter your target keywords and the system will notify you with the posts where these keywords have been mentioned. After, it is up to you whether to reach out to the authors of the posts or not.
Alerts from Ahrefs could be set up in the same way + you can choose from a few options – get all backlinks, new, or lost.
By making these small arrangements for finding new opportunities, you will never be without prospects for your outreach campaigns. And remember that blogger outreach is a part of the entire email marketing strategy you apply in your business.
Hence, if you want to be ahead of your competitors, you must be sure that email marketing is worth your efforts and time. If it is so, your online business engine will work on the fly.
To Sum Up
Don’t think that blogger outreach is as difficult as the length of this guide. It has its pitfalls. But when you understand the concept, you will do it on autopilot.
Hope you find this piece of content useful and now you are another outreach expert who knows how to build links.
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