Blogger outreach can literally ”make” or ”break” your blog. Basically, blogger outreach is all about building relationships-reaching out to other bloggers to figure out how you can help each other. If you spend more time building relationships with relevant bloggers, you will end up getting more traffic, sales and much more. But if you just create content and don’t do outreach, you will be stuck trying to rank in Google and drive targeted traffic. Since a successful outreach campaign has many benefits, let us look at the process of finding bloggers for outreach.
Identify Influential Bloggers
The first crucial step is creating a list of bloggers that you would like to build a relationship with. List down the influential blogs in your niche and then find out the bloggers behind these blogs, together with their contact details. Don’t be too strict about the blogs you include at this stage, you will refine this list later on.
To get a list of influential blogs, use Google. Search for the keywords describing the topics you cover on your blog and pick the blogs that rank for those keywords in Google. You can go further and search for long tail keywords to get more blog results. The other way to find relevant blogs is by using the various free tools available on the internet. Use keywords that describe your blog in the search fields of these tools and you will find blogs in your niche.
Divide Your List of Bloggers into Tiers
Some blogs are bigger and get more traffic than others. You can’t use the same approach for all the blogs on your list. Judging by the social authority, domain authority and comments of each blog, divide your target bloggers into two or three groups. You will now be able to tell from your list whom you should spend most of your time on and who you can approach with an email pitch right away.
Get to be Noticed by Your Target Bloggers
There are those bloggers that you will reach out to in the step above but for the more respectable ones (those in group one) you may want to take a longer route. Get them to notice you by sharing their content, responding to their questions on social media and commenting on their blog posts. You will be surprised how bloggers ( including those with thousands of followers) notice when you give a positive feedback to their work or mention them after sharing their content. If you prefer being a bit direct, send them a brief email telling them how you enjoy reading their content. But don’t fake flattery. They will easily tell if you do and this will ruin your chances of building a relationship with them.
Reach Out
Now it’s time for what you have been preparing for. What you say here will go a long way in determining whether there will be a relationship between you and your target blogger or not. Have a specific reason for reaching out to them. You could request them for a guest post opportunity or ask for a quality backlink to your site. This will portray you as a person who can have a fruitful relationship in the world of blogging and increase the chances of receiving a positive feedback.
Successful blogger outreach is one of the things that contribute to the success of a blog. To make the process easier, find bloggers on this outreach database and then follow the steps above to build a relationship with them. You can interact with bloggers, share blog posts and pitch other bloggers in our database.