Blogger Outreach: How To Do It, And Best Practices To Follow
One tactic of Digital PR that has been in practice for a number of years is blogger outreach. Whether you’re looking to increase your site and page traffic or you want to increase the number of backlinks pointing to your site, blogger outreach may be the next tactic for you to implement…
What we’re going to cover in this article:
How can blogger outreach help my website?
Why should I adopt blogger outreach as a marketing strategy?
The psychology behind a successful blogger outreach strategy
6 Steps to develop a blogger outreach strategy
What is blogger outreach?
Blogger outreach is the process whereby businesses strategically outreach to industry influencers and online publications to build relationships and achieve a certain goal. In the digital PR space, digital PR professionals reach out to establish relationships with influential and niche relevant bloggers and sites from their industry, with the ultimate goal of promotion and backlinks, in order to boost site authority and improve SEO rankings.
In practice, blogger outreach involves identifying relevant bloggers who cater to the target demographic, then reaching out to them with a proposition. It might include sponsored posts, product reviews, guest blogging, content exchanges, or affiliate partnerships.
Successful blogger outreach is built upon the foundation of reciprocal value. While your business and clients will get seen by a new audience, bloggers receive exclusive and new content, products, or services. This is something they can share with their followers, which they haven’t had to create themselves, leading to a mutually beneficial relationship.
However, it is essential to find the right blogger whose niche aligns with the brand’s values and target audience. A mismatch can lead to wasted efforts and poor outcomes. Also, blogger outreach requires tact, as bloggers are often inundated with similar requests.
How can blogger outreach help my website?
Blogger outreach can serve as a powerful tool in driving traffic and backlinks to your website and in turn, raising your brands online visibility and increasing overall engagement.
A well-executed blogger outreach strategy can help you reach a wider audience. When influential bloggers with a strong or niche relevant following link to your brand or product, their audience becomes aware of your existence, leading to a potential surge in visitors to your site.
Following from this, blogger outreach tactics can significantly improve your website’s SEO ranking. When a trusted blogger, with a high domain rating, links back to your site, it signals to search engines that your content is valuable and credible, improving your SEO profile and hopefully improving your rankings in the SERPs.
Bloggers often have a dedicated and loyal audience that values their opinions and therefore if a blogger recommends your site, their followers are likely to see it as a reliable and trusted source, thereby enhancing your brand’s credibility.
Why should I adopt blogger outreach as a marketing strategy?
Blogger outreach as a marketing strategy can really improve your marketing strategy and results. It can help you increase brand visibility, reach new audiences, boost your online credibility, and ultimately drive more conversions and sales.
Quite simply, the main reason why you should incorporate blogger outreach into your marketing strategy is because it works.
Blogger outreach tactics allow you to tap into the trust that other sites, brands, and bloggers have already built, using it to promote your brand. It’s a successful tactic especially for the fact that bloggers have loyal audiences that know, like, and trust them – therefore by associating your brand with those bloggers, you’ll gain trust from a wider audience.
This tactic can also strengthen your website’s overall organic performance, especially when the blogger that you’re working alongside links back to your site within their content, increasing your visibility in search results and in turn, increasing organic visits to your site.
Another significant benefit of blogger outreach is the opportunity it presents for engaging content creation. Bloggers often excel at creating appealing, relatable content that resonates with their audience, therefore showcasing your brand in the best way possible.
10 Benefits of blogger outreach
- Increased brand visibility
- Cost-effective marketing
- Long-term partnerships
- Enhanced credibility
- Improved SEO
- Access to a new niche audience
- Boosted website traffic
- Feedback and insights
- Increased conversions
- Social media exposure
1. Increased brand visibility
Collaborating with bloggers helps expose your brand to a wider audience, and in turn, increases brand awareness.
2. Cost-effective marketing
Compared to traditional advertising methods, blogger outreach can be a cost-effective way to reach potential customers.
3. Long-term partnerships
Successful collaborations can lead to long-term partnerships with bloggers, providing long-term benefits to your business.
4. Enhanced Credibility
When a trusted blogger endorses your product or service, it can improve your brand’s credibility in the eyes of their audience, and in turn, your new audience.
5. Improved SEO
Backlinks from reputable websites can improve your SEO, making your website more visible on search engine results.
6. Access to a new niche audience
Bloggers often have a niche following and therefore partnering with bloggers who cater to your target demographic can lead directly to new customers and visitors for your site.
7. Boosted website traffic
By featuring your brand on their site, bloggers can direct their followers to your site, resulting in increased website traffic.
8. Feedback and insights
Reviews and comments from bloggers and their audience can provide valuable feedback on your product or service.
9. Increased conversions
Recommendations from trusted bloggers can lead to higher conversion rates as their audience is likely to consider their endorsements seriously.
10. Social media exposure
Bloggers often share their posts on social media platforms, indirectly boosting your brand’s social media presence.
The psychology behind a successful blogger outreach strategy
A successful blogger outreach strategy hinges on understanding and applying certain psychological principles, i.e. recognising that people are driven by relationships, emotions, and value perception can significantly enhance the effectiveness of your blogger outreach campaigns.
Building genuine and mutually beneficial relationships is crucial. Bloggers, like all of us, are more likely to engage and collaborate with those they perceive as authentic and appreciative of their work. A personalised outreach approach, acknowledging their content, and explaining why you believe a partnership will be beneficial.
Following this, understanding the power of emotions is key. Bloggers aim to create content that evokes an emotional response in their audience, which fosters deeper engagement. If your product or service can complement this goal, it’s more likely to be positively received by the blogger that you’re reaching out to.
Finally, perceived value significantly influences decisions. Bloggers need to see the value your collaboration offers not only to them but also to their followers. This could be exclusive content, content exchanges, or even product testing of a not yet launched product.
6 Steps to develop a blogger outreach strategy
In order to be successful with blogger outreach, you need to ensure that you’ve got a well-thought out strategy, which is sure to lead you to success.
1. Set a goal
Before kicking off your blogger outreach tactics, you need to ensure that you’ve got a clear goal in mind of what you want to achieve.
Are you trying to build backlinks? Increase brand awareness? Improve traffic? Place higher in the SERPs? Or increase sales? Typically, it’s all of the above!
Make sure you know exactly what you’re trying to achieve, as this will determine how you go about the rest of your blogger outreach strategy.
2. What are you measuring your success against?
Depending on your goals, your measurements of success will vary. For example, if you’re looking to increase backlinks, you want to make sure that you’re using tools such as Ahrefs to monitor the backlinks pointing to your site.
If traffic is something that you’re looking to improve, then you need to make sure you’re aware of how much traffic your site is already getting before you roll out the blogger outreach strategy. As well as this, you need to ensure that the bloggers you’re reaching out to have high monthly traffic, and are performing better than your site. To check traffic of other sites, you can use Similar Web.
If you’re aiming to improve your rankings and other SEO metrics, before approaching a site for blogger outreach you need to look at their DA to ensure that it’s a high DA that your own, and page authority to ensure it will bring value and not appear spammy.longside this, you want to check their content to ensure that it’s relevant to your audience and the backlinks that you’re looking to place.
3. Targeted prospecting
One of the most important parts of blogger outreach is making sure that you’re approaching the right targets, and only reaching out to bloggers and sites that are relevant to you.
There are many ways to do this, whether searching Google after searching for specific queries, or using tools like BuzzSumo or Vuelio to source relevant bloggers, websites, or journalists.
Once you’ve found your prospects, make sure that you spend a good amount of time finding their email addresses. It’s important that you find the direct email of the blogger that you’re trying to contact, as emails to generic email addresses are less likely to find their way to the person you’re trying to reach.
4. What is your offering?
Once you’ve decided on your prospects, you need to finalise what it is you’re offering.
Offers can range from content exchanges, replacing broken links, providing expert material via guest posts, offering free products and testing of services, and in some rare cases, providing payment for placements.
5. Create your outreach email
The key to securing results through blogger outreach is making sure that you’ve written and sent a really strong outreach email.
This email needs to be targeted to whoever you’re writing to, expressing an interest in their blog and their content, and clearly stating what it is that you’re looking for.
State to whoever it is that you’re contacting what you’re able to offer in exchange, as seeing the value in the first email will be appealing to the blogger at hand.
A top tip is to ensure that your subject line is the best that it can be, straight to the point and drawing in the attention of the reader. If your subject line doesn’t catch the reader’s attention, your email may be missed, or even deleted before the blogger you’ve sent it to has the chance to read it.
6. Outreach and secure opportunities
Finally, it’s time to hit send on your outreach email. It may take some time going back and forth with the blogger that you’re emailing, however, it’ll be worth it once your content or site link is live on their site.
Make sure that you’ve taken note of any timeframes, so that you can provide what you have agreed to provide within a reasonable time, and that the blogger has kept to their end of the agreement – as you don’t want to send a guest post over to a blog, for it to get posted 12 months down the line.
How can we help your brand?
So, do you think blogger outreach is the tactic for your business to try? Check out our digital PR services to find out how we can help you or get in touch for more information.
