If you’ve been in the marketing game for a while or you’ve dabbled in the likes of social media, you may have come across the term “blogger” before. If you haven’t, bloggers are an extension of influencer marketing where people share their thoughts and opinions online through written or visual content.
But why does this matter for your marketing strategy? Well, bloggers help drive backlinks and bring traffic to your website as a result.
As we know, Google and other search engines alike love good quality backlinks. Blogger outreach makes up a large part of most SEO experts’ link building strategies. It’s one of the most organic ways to build links and it has high success in bringing active users to your pages. This is fantastic for SEO! By doing so, you don’t only just benefit from search engine crawlers becoming aware of your content but you’re getting the right type of people to your website too.
If you’re excited to learn more about how you can use this effective link building tool, stick with us! It’s time to dive into exactly what this method entails and the many ways for you to start using outreach now.
What is Blogger Outreach?
Simply put, this strategy is exactly as it sounds - it’s all about reaching out to bloggers and asking them to post a link to your content. In other words, it’s asking bloggers to vouch for your website or service as a whole to its readers and search engine crawlers.Most outreach strategies consist of a thorough email campaign, social sharing, as well as blog platform interactions. The goal of your outreach should be to create effective and long-lasting relationships with bloggers and influencers that can be used to build your backlinks. Once these relationships have been crafted and your links have been populated, you will start to an increase in your SERP rankings.
Why is Blogger Outreach Good for SEO?
Anyone who knows SEO will tell you that blogger outreach is gold in bolstering your SERP rankings. If you read our blog post on “How to Increase Backlinks that Matter”, you would already know that search engines love organic links from high-quality sources. The better reputation your linking site has, the better the results will be for your SEO. Enter the likes of bloggers and influencers.Currently, WordPress has over 22.2 billion blog pages that are getting views from upwards of 409 million people per month. That’s a huge audience for you to tap into! With more people coming to your website through these secondary links, the more Google will start to register your content as valuable and boost your ranking accordingly.
This white hat link building technique helps establish credibility for your brand and allows you to develop trust within your target market through quality content. This is exactly what you should be striving for in your SEO strategy!
How Can You Conduct Your Own Blogger Outreach?
Unfortunately, despite the benefits that this SEO strategy may bring, it will require a little bit of elbow grease. The good news is that we’ve got some quick and easy tips to get you started.
Step One: Do Your Research
For your business to reap the benefits of working with bloggers, it’s essential that you do your research on the types of influencers you’d like to work with first. The trick here is to find content that’s not just in line with your business’ value proposition but with your target niche as well. After all, you will see the best results when you’re targeting people who your content will actually appeal to.
Now, there are a few ways for you to build your list of bloggers. The first way is to spend some time on social media by following relevant hashtags and determining who your target audience responds best to. Alternatively, you could make use of specific keyword searches in order to see which blogs rank the best for.
Lastly, there are platforms such as AllTop and BuzzSumo which give you a list of blogs within certain niches.
Step Two: Get to Know Your Bloggers
Now that you know who you want to work with, it’s time to learn more about the person behind the blog. Getting to know who to contact and who writes the blog pieces will come in handy for when it’s time to reach out.
To help you stay organised and to avoid any name fumbles, it’s recommended that you create a blogger spreadsheet. Here you can create columns with your chosen blogs’ contact information, important links, and other noteworthy comments that may prove to be useful further in your communication.
Step Three: Start to Interact with Their Content
A key step to successfully reaching out to bloggers is to get on their radar first. Before sending out your first email, spend some time getting yourself noticed on their blog channel and social media platforms. By simply commenting on their blog posts or liking their content, a relationship will start to form. As a result, the blogger will be able to easily identify who you are and trust what you’re approaching them with.
Step Four: Make Contact
After a few weeks of insightful comments, it's finally time to send out your link building proposal. It’s important to remember that with this step, your outreach strategy will largely depend on your desired outcome. An email asking a blogger to do a guest blog post on your website will look a bit different to a proposal for a share request.Whatever your end goal is, these few points will always come in handy:
<li>Be direct with your intention and be brief with your email</li>
<li>Address the blogger by name and make your email personable with a relevant compliment</li>
<li>Show that you did your homework by referencing a previous blog post or content piece</li>
<li>Avoid the hard sell</li>
To propel your content on SERPs, you can’t go wrong with blogger outreach. Bloggers work wonders for boosting your rankings, improving your quality of backlinks, and bringing the right kind of traffic to your website.