This is a guest contribution from Jonathan John.
If you’ve been reading how-to blog and aleart news content marketing blogs for very long, then you’ve no doubt come across this buzzword: outreach.
Nowadays, all the big guns are talking about outreach and how it’s gonna revolutionize content marketing and take your latest blog posts from 0-100 real quick.
But what exactly is outreach?
Well, in short, outreach is the art of getting others to share or link to your posts. You’re basically leveraging other people’s blogs or social media followings to increase the popularity of your own.
And get this: the people who say that outreach is an effective content promotion strategy are 100% right. Outreach is a very powerful way to quickly get traction to your latest blog posts, an ideal traffic strategy for new bloggers.
That is, when you do it right.
In this post, I’ll discuss seven of the most crucial parts of a successful outreach strategy, and how you can leverage outreach to boost traffic to your blog posts.
1. Begin with the End in Mind
Before you begin your outreach process, you need to plan. You need to begin with the end in mind.
Ask yourself the following questions:
What are my goals?
Outreach is a great strategy to accomplish several things: increased traffic, more connections with influential people, better backlinks from quality sites, etc..
You need to know your goals (always try to write them down as well) before you start the actual process of outreach.
How much time do I have to dedicate to outreach?
Here’s the one pitfall of outreach. The impact from one successful outreach email (e.g. getting one blogger to share or link to your blog post) isn’t particularly high, especially in the short run. So in order to see significant results, you typically have to send out a lot of emails.
Case in point: Brian Dean from Backlinko emailed 160 websites to promote his post on Google ranking factors. Because of the backlinks and visibility he’s gotten as a result, Brian now ranks #1 in the SERPs for “google ranking factors”, which is by no means a low-competition keyword.
Now don’t get me wrong: I’m not saying that you need to email 100+ people for every post you write. Due to time restrictions, that’s an unrealistic goal for many of us, particularly me.
But my point is that a successful email outreach strategy will take up a significant amount of time. So when creating a plan for your outreach strategy, you need to budget time appropriately.
2. Pick the Right Bloggers for Outreach
Here’s what doesn’t work in email outreach: randomly sending out emails to 100+ blogs that “seem” to fit your niche.
Picking the blogs you plan to do outreach to is a very delicate (and time-consuming) process. To be successful at outreach, you will need to spend time creating a list of blogs you’ll reach out to before each post is published (ideally before the post is even written).
Here are a couple ways to find the right blogs to reach out to.
Find Blogs that Have Linked to Similar Content
This method calls for Ahrefs Site Explorer, one of my favorite blogging tools. Site Explorer basically crawls the web to discover all the inbound links for a particular website or webpage.
So let’s say that you run a food blog, and your next post topic is on the dangers of excess soft drink consumption. A quick Google search will reveal several popular blogs that have written on a similar topic.
Pick one high-ranking post (I chose this one from Wellness Mama) and run it through Site Explorer to find the sites that have linked to the post.
You know that these sites have linked to a post on the dangers of soft drinks already in the past. Consequently, they are much more likely to link to your post on the same topic, provided that you ask nicely (more on how to do that later).
Find Influencers Who Have Shared Similar Content
This method works best with Buzzsumo, an updated 2024 mobile phone number data incredibly popular content research tool. Buzzsumo allows you to see the exact people who have shared specific posts on your topic.
Let’s say that this time around, you’re on a digital marketing blog, currently writing a post on generating content ideas. You can use Buzzsumo to identify popular posts on this topic.
Buzzsumo then allows you to drill down and see exactlywho has shared this post on Twitter.
Apply the same concept from the previous method here: since these people have already shared blog posts on content ideation before, they could be quite willing to do it again.
3. Do a Favor for the Influencer Beforehand
Email outreach is all about asking favors. When you send an email to an influencer asking for a tweet, a link, or a Google plus, you’re ከውስጠ-መተግበሪያ ማስታወቂያዎች ጋር ተጠቃሚዎችን ማሳተፍ basically asking them for a favor.
Now, I want you to think back to the last time you did a significant favor for a stranger who’d come to you out of the blue.
No, seriously. Think about it.
Don’t worry, I’ll wait…
If you’re like me, then you probably can’t remember the last time you did so.
And guess what: the influencers you’re reaching out to probably can’t remember the last time they did such a favor, either. So when you ask them for a favor as a total stranger, how likely do you think you are to get the share/link?
