6 Ways to Strengthen Your Blogger Outreach
“Content builds relationships. Relationships are built on trust. Trust drives revenue.” – Andrew Davis
While creating your first outreach pitch, keep this quote in mind. Because whatever you do, in the end, it all comes down to the network you build around your product and around your brand.
Many marketers complain that bloggers reject their pitches, that they don’t even reply to them, and that blogger outreach simply doesn’t work anymore. That isn’t true. In fact, major brands still use blogger outreach to their favor and they are succeeding at it. The only thing to remember here is the ‘process’ that you as a blogger need to refine your pitch further.
We decided to help with that by providing a list of proven techniques that can help you improve your blogger outreach.
6 Ways to Strengthen Your Blogger Outreach
- Create list of bloggers
- Engage with them
- A favor for a favor
- Build relationships with comments
- Write quality content
- Co-produce and collaborate
1. Create a List of Bloggers
First of all, create a list of bloggers that are within your industry. These bloggers shouldn’t be your competitors. Make sure that they also allow guest posts. You can search this by adding the URL of the blog + ‘guest post’ or ‘write for us’ in Google and then checking if they actually allow guest posting or not. If they do, add them to the list. The more bloggers you can get in the list, the better. The DA of each blog should be at least 25. It is better to have at least 50 bloggers in the list that you can reach out to.
Now that you have prepared the list of bloggers, it is time to engage with them.
Note: If this all looks like a hard thing for you, then you can get Blogger outreach services to do this job for you. They will take care of whole writing, producing, and publishing of the content piece.
2. Engage With Them
You can either engage with them through blog comments, twitter tweet or comment in their Facebook group. You will need to do a little research here to get this done. Engagement can vary on a lot of things. So, make sure that you have different methods available. One thing that most bloggers do nowadays is to create a list of experts. For example, ‘top 50 bloggers in YOUR INDUSTRY NAME’ and then publish that post on your blog. Now, you can reach out to all these bloggers and tell them that you have added their name to the list and it will be great if they can share it with their followers. Most of them will say yes to your offer.
In fact, you will automatically start to get a few backlinks through this strategy. But, if you are not sure that this strategy works, then you can create another expert opinion post, adding the opinions of these bloggers in the blog. Seems like a good start right?
3. A Favor for a Favor
You can also ask later ask these bloggers for a guest post on their website, or if they would be interested in linking back to you. Most of them will be ready to link back to you because you have just posted a great piece about them. This is how the favor for a favor actually works.
And, if you want to go a little more creative, then simply ask them to produce a piece in collaboration with you. We will discuss this one in more detail below.
4. Build Relationships Through Comments
In most cases you can’t write a blog post about these bloggers or get their expert opinion for a piece on your blog, then what should you do? Simply build a relationship with them by blog commenting. You need to create positive, thought-provoking comments so that they value it and reply back. If the comment is about a product you are marketing or you are writing a negative comment, most bloggers will simply ignore it. So, make sure to give due importance to their piece whenever you try to post a comment. Later, you can email them saying that you liked their post and want to share more about that content piece on their blog, only if they allow. They will welcome it because it will add value to their blog as well.
5. Write Pieces They Simply Can’t Reject
And when you get the opportunity to write on their websites, the pieces are epic. Don’t give them a chance to reject those pieces simply over the quality. Write to them as you are publishing on your own website i.e. with complete research and by adding visuals, charts, graphics, statistics, and a complete story. More often bloggers don’t trust external bloggers because they think the quality provided by external bloggers is low and not of any value to their readers. This is, of course, true when it comes to low-quality blog posts. But as a blogger forming long-term relationships you need to avoid all these tactics.
6. Co-produce/Collaborate
Another great way to get a yes during your outreach post is by asking for a co-production or a collaboration. This can be on anything. Let’s say you are writing about a research report and another blogger in your domain has fair experience in that research, then you can get them onboard. The co-produced piece can be either an ebook that is available with both of you, or a series of posts that can be on the blog. But this will provide recognition to both the bloggers and the byline will include both their names.
Brian Dean, Neil Patel, and BuzzSumo did a collaborative research study. The post was repurposed on all these blogs. The image provided above is proof of that.
Summary
That’s it. These are some fool-proof ways to improve your blogger outreach method. Practice these points and let us know if you get stuck.
