As we all know, link building is the bread and butter of SEO. However, if you want to secure the top spots in Google, you’re going to need to focus on link building strategies that prioritize topical relevance and authority. And that’s where blogger outreach comes in. Do it correctly, and you’ll net yourself a shiny new dofollow backlink that comes from a niche authority, one of the most effective of its kind.
To this very day, blogger outreach remains one of the top content marketing strategies. In other words, outreach link building is a reliable, evergreen, and, most importantly, fully white-hat SEO method. Learn it one time, and you’ll be able to re-use it time and time again, firmly cementing its place on your off page seo checklist.
In today’s guide, you will learn about blogger outreach and all that goes along with it, including what it is, its SEO benefits, risks, and the exact step-by-step process on how to execute it properly.
What is Blogger Outreach?
Blogger outreach is forming mutually beneficial business relationships with influential bloggers and webmasters in your niche. Typically, this involves you providing unique and valuable content in exchange for a mention and a link back to your website on their blog.
The goal of an outreach campaign is to:
- Increase your brand awareness
- Benefit your website’s SEO
- Increase organic traffic to your website
- Get access to a targeted audience
From a business point of view, there is something to gain for both parties involved. However, to get this to work, you’re going to need to approach the matter with the correct blogger outreach strategy (more on this soon).
What is Link Building?
Link building is the process of acquiring backlinks to your website through various means (blogger outreach is one of them). The benefits of link building are enormous; not only does this help you propel your website to the top of the search engine rankings, but also gets you some organic clicks from users who are browsing the internet.
Google’s algorithm is too complex to cover in a single article, but if there’s one statement that’s generally true, it would be that your website is going to require many high-quality backlinks to conquer the most competitive niches.
To sort out which websites deserve to be placed on top of SERPs, it uses sophisticated logic, and a diversified link profile from relevant sources is a huge vote of confidence that your website is an authority in the niche you’re operating in. And that’s the importance of backlinks in a nutshell.
What are the Benefits of SEO Blogger Outreach for Link Building?
As you can see, these two terms are interconnected in more ways than one. In fact, link building services often rely on SEO benefits of guest posting and blogger outreach to optimize your website for the search engines.
But that’s not the end of the story. In fact, there are other benefits to initiating an outreach campaign:
Great for Backlinks
We’ve already mentioned the benefits of SEO and how getting backlinks is a vital component of your off page seo checklist. However, there’s more to it than that. Did you know that the backlinks you build this way tend to be one of the finest you can acquire? This is due to:
- Topical relevance: the backlink is coming from a website that’s related to your niche (a major ranking signal).
- Editorial placement: as opposed to being placed in the sidebar of footer, the backlink will be placed in an editorial position within the content itself (another major green flag for Google).
- Dofollow tag: getting a dofollow backlink means that some of the website’s authority will pass through to you.
Helps to Build Relationships
Any blogger outreach strategy is about building mutually-beneficial relationships that benefit both parties involved. They get valuable content for free to publish on their website, meaning they don’t have to spend their time, energy, or resources to write it. You, on the other hand, get access to their audience that consists of targeted buyers, in addition to getting a quality dofollow backlink and other benefits.
Increases your Online Visibility
Marketing your products and services online is a matter you should approach from every possible angle. When an opportunity presents itself to position your offerings in front of a starving audience, it’s an opportunity you should take. Keep in mind that the website you’re publishing on has people with similar interests that are rather likely to be interested in what you have to offer.
Content Promotion
No matter what kind of business you’re running, you’re going to need to promote it in some way if you want other people to find it. As it so happens, following the blogger outreach strategy is one of the best options at your disposal. Through content marketing, your website grows organically, and traffic will keep coming in long after you’ve decided to pause your outreach campaign.
Improves Your Website’s Ranking
If you want to conquer the top spots in Google, the importance of backlinks is paramount to your success. To acquire them, what is better than an editorial dofollow backlink that’s coming from a thematically-related blog? That’s what guest blogging is all about.
Increases Trust and Brands Credibility
If you want to stand any chance of making a sale, you’re going to need a prospective customer to trust you. Without trust, they are likely to flock to your competition. Therefore, building your businesses’ trust and credibility is a sensible investment to make. The more people that endorse it, the easier it will be to land a new customer.
Helps you to Connect with Your Target Audience
In marketing, targeting the right demographics is everything. After all, it makes little sense to try making a garage door sale to people who don’t even own a vehicle or have any real estate to their name. Hence, proper audience targeting makes all the difference between a successful and an unsuccessful content marketing campaign.
Blogger Outreach Tools For Link Building
Traditionally, outreach link building involves contacting every blogger directly and that’s after doing your research to compile such a list in the first place. Then, you have to hope for them willing to take you up on your offer, which, in this industry, is quite hard, because most of the responses you’ll get are either going to be a “no” or they won’t bother to respond to you in the first place.
That’s why blogger outreach tools and platforms like OutreachZ are effectively revolutionizing the game by giving you easy access to a pre-vetted database of bloggers who have already demonstrated their willingness to participate in a guest blogging arrangement. This means you only need to pay your subscription fee and the platform will take care of the rest.
Process of Blogger Outreach for Link Building
The fact of the matter is, blogger outreach takes time. In addition, you won’t be able to find an infinite number of prospects in your niche, so you really need to make all your efforts count. Plus, there are other technical aspects you need to keep in mind such as deliverability of your emails.
With this in mind, we’ve prepared a step-by-step blogger outreach process for you to follow to ensure optimal results.
Find Leading/Prominent Bloggers
Your knee-jerk reaction might be to do a simple Google search, and there’s nothing wrong with that approach. However, to save you some valuable time in the process, it makes sense to check out hand-curated directories that list out some of the most influential blogs in your niche. For best results, it’s best to combine these two techniques.
Research and Make a List of Bloggers
Just as bloggers are discerning in regard to who they want to be working with, you want to adopt the same mindset and pre-qualify your prospective business partners as well. As you narrow down your list of bloggers, focus on the following:
- Their follower numbers
- SEO authority
- Reputation of the brand
- Level of interaction their website gets
- Etc.
Feel free to organize them into clusters and make your selection of A, B, and C tier prospects.
Identify the Right Guest Blogging Opportunities
There is another technique you can resort to in your search that will up the chances of your success. For instance, let’s suppose you’ve discovered a website that’s linking to a lower-quality article that you’ve produced a much superior version of. You can alert them to the fact and mention why your article is simply a much better resource.
There’s a similar technique you can try if they are linking to an article that’s no longer published (ask them to replace it with yours). Lastly, see if you can find websites that mention you in their content without directly linking to you (it’s an easy fix).
Find your Prospects Email Address
Before you can reach out to them, you’re going to need to get your hands on their contact details. If you’re skilled with using Google, that’s a good way to do it. However, there are other dedicated online tools that can help you get the job done much faster, a good example of which is Hunter. It also has its own browser extension. A good alternative is Voila Norbert.
If all else fails, consider reaching out to your prospects through other means such as their social media handle. Also, keep in mind that some of them have an established process for colalborations of this nature, meaning you’re goling to have to go through the onboarding process on their official website or something similar.
Reach Out to the Bloggers by Using Their Contact Information
If you want to ensure a high response rate and get a lot of yesses, it’s going to be crucial to follow the right blogger outreach strategy. In other words, how you address them and structure your email can make all the difference.
Since they’re probably getting a ton of requests like these, you need to give them a solid reason why they should choose you. In case you’re just starting out, you can google a blogger outreach email template to use as your starting point.
General pointers:
- Keep it short and to the point
- Personalize (address them by their name)
- Slide in a compliment or two
- Mention why this type of content would do well on their blog
Organize and Handle Your Blogger Outreach Project
Since you’re going to be contacting a long list of bloggers, you should keep your workflow organized by using a spreadsheet. After all, it would look unprofessional, not to mention embarrassing, to contact the same person twice (unless it was an intentional follow-up email).
This is no rocket science; simply create one column for their name, one for their contact details, and another for any special comments and remarks you might have. It helps to track whether they have responded to your email already and what phase the negotiation is at, similarly to what CRM software allows you to do.
Understand Your Results and Optimize Your Blogger Outreach Strategy
At the end of your blogger outreach campaign, it’s time to sit back, give it some time, analyze your results and take in the lessors learned. Again, it’s completely normal that you won’t get a response most of the time, especially if you’re just starting out and your website is still fresh.
If you want to send a follow-up email to someone who hasn’t responded yet, don’t be annoying or spammy. As a general rule of thumb, it’s fine to send a follow-up email once every couple of months.
Common Risks Involved in a Link Building Campaign
Of course, blogger outreach has certain risks you need to keep in mind:
Getting Links from Low Quality Sites
This game is about quality, not quantity. In other words, it’s better to get a couple of high-quality, niche-relevant backlinks than a whole bouquet of spammy backlinks that will only hurt your website’s SEO. If you’re outsourcing the task, please make sure you’re working with a reputable provider so there won’t be any unpleasant surprises on your backlink profile. Also, don’t be lured by websites that accept any post that comes their way – you want them to have some sort of quality filter in place (this makes sure the website in question stays a quality resource and doesn’t devolve into a toxic link farm).
Avoid Buying/Selling Links
Google is strictly against manipulating its search engine algorithm, a stance its representatives made clear on several occasions. If, for example, a certain website openly advertises it’s selling backlinks for a monetary compensation, both can get penalized. At the same time, if you’re going to get a backlink from an obvious link farm that accepts anything and everything, this is a toxic backlink that will do more harm than good.
Getting Your Site Penalized by Google
Generally, Google wants to see your website acquiring backlinks naturally. This means that any unnaturally acquired backlink could be seen as search engine algorithm manipulation, and thus penalized accordingly. This is particularly true if the site you’re looking to get a backlink from openly advertises that it provides backlinks in exchange for monetary or other forms of compensation. Also, the website you’re trying to source a backlink from may be a link farm, in which case you’re setting yourself up to get a toxic backlink from a bad neighborhood.
Lack of Honesty/Clarity From the Contractor
If you’re planning to take on the task of doing blogger outreach yourself, you’re going to have full control over the entire process. However, if you’re going to outsource it, this comes with certain risks, particularly if your freelancer or contractor isn’t fully transparent with you where they’re going to source their backlinks from. For instance, they might tell you they’re seeking out guest posting opportunities, all the while they could be using your money to blast your website with toxic PBN backlinks.
Not Using Anchor Text Correctly
Remember what we said about having a natural backlink profile? If all of your backlinks have the same exact keyword match anchor to them, this virtually screams “link manipulation”. It’s much better to mix it up by including some longer sentences, sometimes without any kind of keyword at all. Also, don’t forget to throw in some branded anchors every once in a while.
Conclusion
Blogger outreach is one of the most effective strategies to secure high quality editorial dofollow backlinks. At the same time, it helps position your brand as a voice of trust and authority, placing your offerings in front of targeted demographics. Since it’s mutually-beneficial business proposition, many bloggers and webmasters will be inclined to take you up on your offer if you provide enough value by writing top-notch content anyone would be happy to publish.