Relationship building is the key towards a successful digital marketing strategy.
As content marketers and link builders, the ability to identify and connect with key influencers and decision makers in your industry plays an important role in your success online.
But wait, if you’re one of those who think ‘guest blogging is dead’. Well, at least according to Matt Cutts. I bet you didn’t check out this post from Groove HQ “How We’ve Reached More Than1 Million People by Guest Blogging.”
The thing is that guest blogging was being practiced for a number of years before it came into the limelight as SEO Strategy, bloggers wrote columns on high authority websites and have an author byline where they get a link back to their website.
This was and still is a very effective strategy when used the right way to build your reputation and following online, however, SEOs took this idea and scaled it by creating purposeless content with exact match anchor text, trying to manipulate and rank for the target keywords which forced Google to call it off as a dead strategy.
If you are using outreach to build relationships and reach a wider audience and build a brand like Groove HQ did, you are going to see results.
In this Guide, we’ll cover everything about Outreach from benchmarking to prospecting to advance strategies for finding the right contact person, email templates and tools to help you with your outreach efforts.
Introduction
Outreach or Blogger outreach is the process of reaching out to bloggers or site owners, i.e. decision makers to a find common point of interest and build relationships.
Outreach can be done both online and offline for example, you can meet bloggers at events or conferences but for the purpose of this guide, we’ll focus on online outreach only.
It is a cost-effective way to reach out to highly targeted individuals and prospects that have more/varied readership than what you already have. By reaching out to them in the right way and at the right time, you get the potential to reach far wider audience and your content has the potential to go viral. While outreach is primarily associated with link building campaigns, it can be used for other reasons too.
Here is a list of reasons you can use blogger outreach for:
a) Guest Post – You reach out to websites in your industry that have guest contributors and subject matter experts and pitch to write a post on their blog to tap into their audience and grow your visibility and brand online.
b) Product Review – You reach out to bloggers who review products for their audience, this can be anything from beauty products to fashion to health and fitness products. The purpose is to reach out to them and ask them to review your product in return of a giveaway or a fee.
c) Build a relationship – You’ve come across someone who is in the same industry or share same ideas and beliefs as you do, you can reach out to them. Offer some value, a free advice or something that will help you break the ice and build trust and credibility for you to connect with that individual.
d) Broken Link Building– You’ve come across, or you’ve found broken links on established resource pages where you’d want to get links from. There are some best practices involved, which will increase the success rate of your efforts.
e) Interview Requests - You want to reach out to influential bloggers for an interview on your blog or invite them to be a guest on your podcast or webinar.
f). Spread your Content – If you’ve created a piece of content that is helpful to the audience of your prospects, share it with them in a way that is helpful and not too pushy.
Benchmarking for Outreach
If you want your outreach campaign to drive profitable outcome for you, you need to set a certain benchmark and criteria on sites you want to acquire links from. Before you pitch to any website, make sure you ask yourself these questions:
Is the website regularly updated? When was the last time the blog was updated and if their posts receive legitimate comments?
Are they active on social media and have a considerable amount of genuine following? Do some Twitter searches for their domain name: Does their audience engage with and share their content?
What is the Domain Authority of the website? Do they have quality links with diverse anchor text ratio?
Do they have an active newsletter and if people subscribe to their blog?
What is the ratio of guest posts on the websites to the content written by blog owners/editor? If the blog is dominated by guest posts alone, steer away.
How strict are the guest post guidelines? In my opinion, it is better if they have strict guidelines.
Once you understand what you are looking for you can now proceed by installing the Moz Toolbar on your browser to help you filter sites that are both relevant and have high domain authority and then review if they meet your domain authority criteria.
For those who don’t know, Domain Authority (DA) is an authentic metric used in the industry to rate the authority and popularity of a website. The rating is from 0 to 100, the higher the better.
You’ll need to set benchmark e.g reach out to websites with Domain Authority 30 or higher and start making your list in an Excel file where you can keep tabs on websites, tier domain rank, and if you’ve reached out to them, received any response and when to follow-up. This way, you can stay organized and scale your outreach campaign.
Blogger Outreach Prospecting
Prospecting is one of the most important step of outreach as it requires some skill to find high value and relevant prospects to pitch to. Even if your standards and outreach abilities are exceptionally high, there’s little point if you’re targeting the wrong sites.
If you’re just starting out with blogger outreach, it would be best to go for the free option and invest time and effort in understanding and mastering the art and philosophy of outreach before paying for tools because once you figure out how you want to run your outreach campaign, you’ll be able to figure out which software you need and what features would help you scale your outreach campaign.
Here are 8 ways with which you can identify and build a list of high quality blogs in different industries and sectors.
1. Advanced Search Queries
I came across advance search queries when Google launched Power Searching course and fell in love with queries and have started using them a lot since I picked up the skill to find what I need through Google. If you are serious about link building or outreach, you need to acquire these skills and not use Google as a typical college student or as any house wife would do.
Here are five advance search queries that you can use:
Inurl Search (Fitness inurl:blog / Fitness blog inurl:.co.uk)
These search queries will filter results of websites that have your preferred search term or domain extension. As you can see in the above example, the first search string Fitness inurl:blog gave me results with Fitness blogs.
Exact Phrase Search (Fitness “Guest post” / Fitness “Write for us”)
The exact phrase search query is the most popular of all, this can be used to filter search results with the exact word you’re looking for. These can be really handy in your initial outreach effort as you can see in the example above, we were able to find sites with our Exact Match Keyword both in the page url and title with relevant results.
Here are Few possible Exact Match Search Operators:
Your Keyword “guest post”
Your Keyword “write for us”
Your Keyword “guest article”
Your Keyword “guest post opportunities”
Your Keyword “this is a guest post by”
Your Keyword “contributing writer”
Your Keyword “become an author”
Your Keyword “become guest writer”
Your Keyword “become a contributor”
Please note that the queries above might not return high quality results, in that case you can try the following queries to get more search results.
“keyword inurl:blog”
“guest post by”
keyword “guest post written by”
Intitle Search (Fitness Intitle:Guest Post / Fitness Intitle: Advertise)
This search phrase will help you find search results of websites that have your specified keyword in their page title. As you can see above we used the Fitness InTitle:Advertise tag to find advertising information of the Fitness blogs.
This can be done in any industry to find key pages such as lists, guides, resources, media kits, and advertising information, etc.
Wildcard Search (Finance “Guest *” inurl:blog)
The Wildcard search (*) is a very interesting operator. As the name suggests it filters results that contain the exact words within your query and an additional word in the position of the wildcard. The above query will return Finance blogs that feature “guest post”, “guest writer”, “guest blog” etc. within their content or title (with the second word in place of the wildcard).
Blog Author Search (Inpostauthor:query)
InPostAuthor: is also known as the blog author search — will search blog posts for the author. This is a very sneaky operator which can be used to track prolific bloggers across the web. In the example above I typed in Brian Honigman’s name to find out where he has published content as an author and pitch those blogs for guest contribution.
Here are few other possible search queries for Tracking Competitor’s Campaigns:
Inpostauthor:”Firstname Last” –site:mycompeitor.com
Inurl:Guest Post “Firstname Last” –site:mycompeitor.com
Intitle:Guest Post “Firstname Last” –site:mycompeitor.com
“Author: Firstname Last” –site:mycompetitor.com
“Written by Firstname Last” –site:mycompetitor.com
“Author Profile” “Firstname Last”
“About the Author” “Firstname Last”
“Author Bio” “Firstname Last”
Inurl:Author “Firstname last”
Make sure to check for any similarity in author bios as a lot of people add author bios with slight variations which can be tracked using the exact match search operator.
2. Brand & Author Mentions
If you’re keeping a close eye on your competitor and want to know when and where they’re building links, it is important that you track both brand mentions as well as any particular author leading the outreach effort as Amanda DiSilvestro does for Higher Visibility.
Here’s how you can track the mentions through Google:
-site:highervisibility.com –site:facebook.com –site:twitter.com “Higher Visibility” OR “http://www.highervisibility.com” OR “Highervisibility.com”
-site:highervisibility.com –site:facebook.com –site:twitter.com “Amanda DiSilvestro”
In this strings above you’ll see (-) sign which is used to exclude any search results including the specified websites e.g we don’t want to see results including the website and social profiles.
You can use tools like Google Alerts, Fresh Web Explorer, and Mention.net to automate the monitoring process so you can receive notifications when your competitor publishes any new post.
If you are using Google alerts you can enter the following strings to track the mentions As-It Happens, Once a Day or Once a Week:
“Omnicore” –site:omnicoreagency.com
“Omnicore Agency” –site:omnicoreagency.com
“Salman Aslam” CMO –site:omnicoreagency.com
“Salman Aslam” Chief Marketing Officer –site:omnicoreagency.com
3. Curated Lists
These are literally done-for-you resources that are available on the web, all you need to do is go and find them as others have already done the work to compile the list, but make sure the websites you come across meet your benchmark metric i.e Domain Authority also if they are frequently updated or haven’t published anything for months.
You can use the following search queries in Google to find the curated list.
Top/best lists, ie “Top 10 Finance Blogs”
Curated lists, ie “List of Marketing Blogs”
Twitter lists, ie site:twitter.com inurl:lists “fitness bloggers’”
4. Influencer Search Engines
There are some great Influencer search engines out there which you can use in your outreach campaigns. Let’s take a look at these tools:
Follower Wonk (Twitter):
Follower Wonk is a twitter focused search engine that allows you to search through Twitter profiles, helping you to identify targets for building relationships or just approaching for link-building.
Example: If you’re looking to reach out to Lifestyle Entrepreneurs for your podcast, you can simply enter the keyword, and the search engine will list entrepreneurs’ twitter profile which you can filter and rank by available metrics such as the number of followers, tweets or social authority.
Topsy (Twiter + Social Web):
Topsy is another search engine which isn’t restricted to Twitter but covers the social web, including blogs, which can be used to find Social Influencers. You can search for articles, tweets, videos, and photos across the web. You can search for your competitor’s brand, keywords or websites and find out who’s talking about you or your competitor and reach out to them. You can use Topsy to find popular content from your competitor or search for guest contribution opportunities.
You can also find influencers that have shared your content or any given URL. You can use this to analyze popular industry posts and list down the Influencers in your spreadsheet whom you can share your posts once you publish to reach their audience.
In the example above I see that Meloine a LinkedIn Expert and KissMetrics have shared my content, since they like what I wrote I can share this article to them once it goes live. You can apply this in your industry to find influencers who share great content and connect with them.
BuzzSumo (Content Marketing):
BuzzSumo is the latest player in town which allows you to find key Influencers and top performing content in your Industry (based on social shares across the major networks) related to any keyword that you enter.
This tool is built to the core for content marketers with the ability to filter content in the form of:
a. Articles
b. Infographics
c. Guest Posts
d. Giveaways
e. Interviews
f. Videos
You can also filter Influencers by the following categories:
a. Bloggers
b. Influencers
c. Companies
d. Journalists
e. Regular People
With Buzzsumo you can easily use the top content to:
Find authoritative sites in the niche for your content
Locate the people that share the content related to your niche
Find the sites that are owned by the people who share content in the niche
Locate the sites that are also by shared by these people
Here is a handy guide on using BuzzSumo for Building Outreach Lists.
5. Alltop.com
Alltop is a place where you can find the best blogs on the internet categorized by different niche. It is my go to source for finding Influencers and leading publications when I am doing outreach for clients. Let’s say I was looking to reach out to Photographers, I’d simply go to Alltop.com and enter the keyword in the search bar and click on the Photography Tag, which will take me to the list of Photography Blogs.
Since these are really popular sites, not many will be open to a guest post pitch but if you have a great resource, an infographic or strong content asset, reaching out to these blogs can yield great results.
6. Twitter Outreach
Twitter is a really powerful tool to connect with Influencers, but I’ve not seen too many people using or discussing using Twitter for blogger outreach so this can be considered as an untapped strategy.
Similar to Google, Twitter has its own search engine which you can visit at Search.twitter.com and enter the search query Keyword + “Guest Post”, you can replace Guest Post with keywords like review, product review, contribution to explore more results.
One thing that I like about Twitter is that the results are generated on real time as compared to Google which means the propsects are warm and active and more than likely to respond to your request, all you need to do is ask.
Let’s say if I was interested in writing about Conversion Optimization, I’ll simply enter Conversion + “Guest Post” and see instant results like these:
Now this is great, the results are fresh, some of them just few hours ago, but what if I could show you something that will increase the success rate of your campaign a lot more than what you’ll get following the strategy above?
Cool right? Let’s dig into the strategy.
7. Breadcrumb Trail Technique
There are two steps to this process, the first is the seed the breadcrumbs i.e the content and second step is to follow the trail and pick up guest post opportunities along the way.
a) Leaving Breadcrumbs: The first step is to find and publish content on high authority websites where you can get your foot in the door and seed the initial content which will you with the second step. Usually these are sites which are high in authority and yet easy to publish content on initially e.g Business2Community & Social Media Today are two websites which are open to contributions, though they are reviewed by editors to ensure the content that is published is of high quality.
You can backtrack the twitter accounts of influencers to see where do they find the content from to share with their audience and then pitch those sites for a guest post opportunity.
Once you publish a content on high authority website, you’ll see that a lot of people share the article without any promotion which also includes influencers and other prolific blogs where you can then pitch to for contribution.
Here is a screenshot of post I did for Social Media Today few months back and as you can see it has over 1000 Tweets, which means there are over 1000 people who found the post to be valuable and shared it, this also means you have 1000 breadcrumbs to pick now.
b) Trailing:
Once you’ve published the content, wait for a few days or week perhaps to allow more time for people to share your post.
Go to Search.twitter.com and enter the exact title of your post, you’ll see the complete list of people who have shared your content, Now that you can start picking up ideal prospects and thank them for sharing your content and soft pitch them. If they’re interested, which they usually are, they’ll reply back with a yes and you can take it from there.
and that is how you can leverage the power of social sharing to capture more opportunities, and you can use the breadcrumb trail technique outside of twitter too.
What if I can tell you that you can get links from major sites like Mashable, Forbes, Yahoo, etc. We know how big it is to get links from sites like these, but the fact is that if you are reaching out to them directly, you have a very slim chance of even getting a reply back from them since they employ few writers who get bombarded with email pitches day in and day out.
Remember the breadcrumb trail technique we discussed earlier?
All you need to do is start paying attention if you are serious about getting links from sites like these, you need to understand what type of content they publish and most importantly what is their source of the story. Sites like these have content partnerships with other news websites.
I came across this during Infographic outreach for a client and saw similar opportunities on other major publications. Here is an example where you can see a story published on Mashable whereas it was published by a writer on Clickz, turns out Mashable has a content partnership with Clickz.
You can search Clickz inside Mashable search bar to see what type of stories they pick up from Clickz and you can either reach out to the writer directly or apply to become a contributor and write a weekly column and increase your chances of being picked up by Mashable.
Similary Forbes get their stories from sites like AllBusiness, O’Reilly Media, and more sites. Yahoo gets their stories from BGR News and Business2Community.
Amazing things can happen when you start paying attention!
8. Reverse Engineering
Reverse engineering is a process in which we analyze competitor’s backlink profile using tools to find new opportunities and at the same time evaluate the strategy being deployed by them.
You can come across several things during the competitive backlink analysis e.g:
Discover websites where your competitors are contributing regularly, and you can apply to become a contributor there.
Content assets produced by competitors that have done well across the web in terms of links acquired, social shares and overall coverage, these can be Infographic or content resources e.g Link Building Guide.
Anchor text ratio that is being used by competitors, and if it makes sense for you to go after that keywords.
Competitive backlink analysis is what i regularly do to keep track of my competitors and the campaigns we do for our clients as it helps us come across new opportunities and ideas for our link building campaigns.
Here are a list of tools which you can use for competitive backlink analysis:
Ahrefs
Majestic SEO
Opensite Explorer
SEO Spyglass
TL;DR
Do Blogger outreach for relationship building, branding and traffic.
Set up a benchmark for your outreach campaign.
Build a list of highly targeted prospects using prospecting techniques and don’t just stick with one prospecting strategy,
Try the untapped Breadcrumb Trail Technique.
That sums up our first part of this guide, in the next part we’ll cover advance topics related to outreach which includes Finding the right contact person, advance tools to scale link building process, email pitch templates with real life pitch examples and case studies.
Make sure to subscribe to receive notification as soon as we publish the second part of this guide.
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