By Matt Adams
As a small business owner, it’s important to get eyes on your website. Often, through simple yet effective ways of doing it.
You already know that doing blogger outreach is an essential strategy for growing a website. This is partly because it builds trust and credibility. But it also sends direct traffic to your blog. Influencers are much more likely to find out about your website (and share it), even if you’re new to the game.
If you’re really keen to implement a blogger outreach campaign, then this article will take you through five steps of having a truly successful strategy.
1. Start with Outreach in Mind
Most people would begin by thinking about what subject to write about, then they would decide and just get typing. Believe it or not, there’s actually a strategic way of choosing a really effective subject. Here it is.
Firstly, think of a broad keyword. An example might be the phrase Business Analysis. Type that phrase into Google and check the organic results, especially the top three. Ignore the ads.
Here you can see that iiba.com and Wikipedia.org are the highest results on the page.
Next, copy and paste the URL of the top results and pop it into Moz’s Link Explorer. You want to see how many domains are linking back to that particular URL. That’s because the more domains that link back, means the more popular your suggested subject is and the more opportunity you have for reaching out to prospective influencers.
Here’s what the results look like for the Wikipedia page on Business Analysis…
As you can see, there’s 360 linking domains to this page. That means you have 360 outreach opportunities just for this one subject. The reason you know they are opportunities is because these website owners have decided to put an external link on their site, which means they know how to do it. The other reason is because there’s a very high chance that their page and even website is relevant to your subject.
There you go, nothing too difficult. Just think of a few, relevant broad search terms that relate to your industry and you have a much positive outlook for your new blogger outreach campaign.
2. Find Real Searches People are Typing In
There are two ways you can do this; one way is to use the Keyword Magic Tool in SEMRush. Here’s how.
Start by simply typing in your broad term. The tool will look at all the surrounding words and provide you with the sideline opportunities.
The first thing to notice is the volume of opportunity – in this case it’s 31,140.
Below the total volume, you get the overall search volume for each individual keyword. Here you can see there’s a few that show up top:
- Bcs business analysis
- Iseb business analysis
- Business analysis techniques
So straight away, you have a few additional subjects which you could now focus on in your blog post. Simply download the full report and look through the search terms to decide which ones you would enjoy writing a blog post on.
The next way to find what people are searching for is by putting your search term into Answer The Public.
You get all the questions that people are writing about, like this:
If you’re getting mesmerized by the circle, don’t worry, there’s an Excel download you can run to. And it’s free to use.
Now, you have a prosperous subject and a whole host of things to write about – it’s time to get writing
3. Write the Ultimate Blog Post
It’s a common talking point in 2018 – you need to write the best post you possibly can. Of course, you don’t always need to write the ultimate guide and make it several thousands words long. But if your strategy for this post is outreach and you want to get the influencers talking about you, then it’s true. You need to produce the best work that’s available for free on the web.
If you don’t, you might get a few eyes on your blog post, but I doubt you will get many references back to your site. Which is the ultimate goal for you.
Include images, too. By including images, you break up the post significantly. Not only that, you will also capture the scrollers. They are people who just scroll down the page without reading much of the content. Video is also an important tool to keep people on the page.
As we know, bounce rate and engagement rate are now a true factor in rankings. Here’s a report from SEMRush that shows what influences a site’s rankings. A few years ago, total backlinks would have been right at the top.
4. Choose Your Outreach Recipients
Remember the report you ran in Moz in step 1? Now it’s time to make use of that report.
Download the Excel file of backlinking domains and go through each of them to find out who the author is of the post that links to the top page of your chosen query. Sometimes the author of the post is also the website owner – great! You can send an email directly to them and ask them to take a look at your work.
Other times, and with the rise of guest blogging, the author may not be available through the website. That means you need to use other means to get hold of them.
Are they on Twitter? Or LinkedIn? How can you engage with the author who has the ability to reference your work on the web.
Take your time. The more time you spend engaging with influencers, the better your opportunities of them referencing your page or website.
On the other hand, if you do want a quick way to find contact details from the linking domains, there are tools out there which can help. That’s outside the scope of this post, but just remember automation is no replacement for good solid engagement and responsiveness.
To help you further, here’s an example of what a nice outreach email could look like
Two weeks later…
5. Follow Up with the People You Reached Out To
This is the most important part of outreach, but sadly often the most forgotten. You MUST follow up with the influencers you outreached to.
Here’s why…
With the increase of automated emails, most authors just think you’ve emailed them on autopilot and you really don’t care about them. But if you follow up with a very simple email such as “Hey, just wondering if you received my email last week.” Then most will think your genuine.
You could even go as far to send a third email. Make your judgement based on how important they are to you. Just don’t only send one email and expect to get a really high response rate, it won’t happen.
So that are five simple steps to a more successful outreach campaign. Time to get going.
Photo credit: Social outreach concept from nopporn/Shutterstock
