The majority of successful link building campaigns involve blogger outreach in some shape or form.
This process normally requires you to send your link prospects an email to get things rolling. Once successful, you can secure links from authoritative sites that can move the needle in SERPs and help you rank on top.
However, blogger outreach is easier said than done. Since an outreach campaign consists of different moving parts, a small mistake in the process could lead to massive losses down the line. Therefore, you need to get every aspect of outreach right to ensure that you can secure the best backlinks possible.
In this post, we’ll enumerate the best practices of blogger outreach that you must know by heart:
Automate the Outreach Process Using Tools
Blogger outreach involves these steps:
- Find link opportunities and filter them based on authoritativeness.
- Find accurate email addresses of site owners to avoid low bounce rates.
- Send initial and follow-up emails to guarantee high response rates.
While doing these things manually is possible, it is also very time-consuming and leaves a lot of room for error. Due to the volume of data that you’ll be managing, it’s easy to miss out on a thing or two that could derail your campaign from the start.
To avoid this issue, use tools that will help gather data for you and run your campaign on autopilot.
For finding link prospects, use Ahrefs to help you find competitor backlinks and analyze each one based on traffic and authority, among other metrics.
Finding the email addresses of prospects is made easier using Hunter. You can just type in the domain of the link prospect and it will spit out various emails that you can use for sending your campaigns.
Finally, Mailshake will send the emails for you in the background as you focus on other things at hand. You can also personalize your blogger outreach email template to ensure that you connect with your prospects on a much deeper level. This way, you could increase response rates and generate more backlinks for your campaign.
These are just some of the tools you can use. You’re probably using similar tools at this point, but it’s important to reiterate the importance of using the right software to refine your outreach workflow.
Develop a Strong USP for Your Outreach
Your goal is clear: you want to secure a link from influential bloggers so you can raise your online presence on search engine results pages (SERPs).
However, it’s not just about you in this case. You also need to give bloggers a reason as to why they should link out to your site.
Therefore, you need to work on your campaign’s unique selling point (USP). You must answer why your email is valuable to bloggers and how they can benefit from it.
The USP of your blogger outreach depends on what page you want bloggers to link to. For example, if you want bloggers to link to your page instead of your competitor’s, list down the reasons why they should do it.
Keep in mind that even showing why bloggers should link to you won’t necessarily encourage them to take action immediately. Blogger outreach is a numbers game: the more emails you send out, the higher the chances bloggers will link to you. And the only way you can do this is by refining your USP.
Make the Most Out of Your Messages
The heart of an effective blogger outreach campaign is your ability to craft your emails and follow-ups. They will ultimately determine whether or not your outreach efforts will bear fruit and land you a link on their site.
Below are things you need to be wary of when it comes to reaching out to relevant bloggers in your niche:
- Personalize your emails – Mention the names of each blogger in the email’s headline and message. This lets them know that you are addressing them in your email. Also, if you’re referencing a post the blogger has written, you must include its title and URL.
- Make them short and sweet – Popular bloggers don’t have a lot of time in their hands so make the message as concise as possible. Get straight to the point from the get-go by answering why you’re reaching out to them, how you can provide value to them, and what they should do with your message.
- Don’t annoy them with too many follow-ups – Follow-up emails are important because many bloggers could have missed the first one you sent. However, there’s a breaking point to the number of follow-ups you can send to them. It’s best to send at least a follow-up email sharing with them the benefits of engaging with you.
Track and Measure
Your blogger outreach campaigns are only as good as your previous ones. And the great thing about this tactic is you can monitor the progress of your campaigns over time.
Using your preferred blogger outreach tool, you can see how many bloggers opened and replied to each of your emails. From here, you can gather insights as to why your campaign performed the way it did. Maybe your headlines aren’t compelling enough or your message doesn’t resonate with the bloggers. Regardless, you need to find a way to improve the performance of your outreach campaign.
To do this, apply the changes to your next campaign and see if the open and response rates increased or not. By following this process, you can always find ways to make your blogger outreach even better as your progress.
Build Long-Lasting Blogger Relationships
Your blogger outreach strategy doesn’t end after securing a link from their blogs. Continue sharing their content on your brand’s social media accounts, commenting on their posts, and finding other ways to engage with them.
From here, it’s possible that other bloggers will do the same for your website. They’ll start sharing content and even link to some of your pieces by themselves.
At this point, you’re growing a mutually beneficial relationship with your blogging partners via influencer marketing. Since you’re constantly providing value to them, they’ll be more than willing to return the favor. This way, you can further extend your brand awareness and extend your reach to new audiences.
Blogger Outreach the Linkplicity Way
We at Linkplicity believe in the power of blogger outreach. Aside from observing the best practices above, we also add in a little extra to make sure that all the bloggers we’ll reach out to own authority websites that people actually visit.
To do this, we only reach out to websites with at least 500 monthly organic traffic and DR 20.
By getting links from sites with these metrics, if not more, we can help get your website to rank higher on search results and generate more traffic and revenue.
Conclusion
If you plan on launching a successful blogger outreach campaign yourself, the best practices above should help you get started with your campaign.
However, there’s more to blogger outreach than just following what works. Since this tactic is a long-term strategy, you need to learn how to scale it properly. And it’s impossible to stay on top of every campaign if you’re the only one doing it.
That’s why you need a blogger outreach expert like us at Linkplicity. We will contact bloggers for guest blogging and other link types on your behalf. More importantly, we will monitor the progress of the campaign to make the necessary improvements on the next one.
If you want to take the pressure of blogger outreach off your shoulders, drop us a line and we’ll let you know how we can help.
