Authoritative and genuine backlinks are crucial SEO elements that improve your search engine rankings. Including backlinks significantly boosts rankings on search engines like Google, as it considers backlinks as votes of confidence.
While there are several ways to add backlinks, such as sponsored links, web directories, comment links, and hidden links—all these tactics are black hat practices, which result in poor SEO performance of your website. Moreover, Google is more likely to penalize your website, especially if you purchase links.
So, how do you build high-quality backlinks without relying on black hat link-building solutions or falling under the risk of backlink penalization?
One effective way is blogger outreach. Whether you’re a content marketing manager trying to promote your company’s new blog or a business owner looking for ways to promote your new products are services—a blogger outreach strategy is what you need.
In this article, we’ll discuss blogger outreach and dive deeper into how to build an excellent blogger outreach strategy to build quality backlinks to your website.
Blogger Outreach: A Quick Overview And Benefits
If you’re aware of influencer marketing, blogger outreach isn’t much different.
It’s the practice of connecting and strategically communicating with established bloggers and thought leaders relevant to your business niche.
The aim is to connect with these bloggers for future partnerships to achieve goals like:
- Potential partnerships for promoting your products and services to the blogger’s massive audience and gaining exposure.
- SEO and content marketing to promote new content, land guest posting opportunities, and earn quality backlinks.
- Influencer marketing to build valuable partnerships with the top influencers in the industry and enhance your business authority and brand reach.
- PR to gain more brand exposure through content and increase awareness.
However, we’ll look at leveraging blogger outreach to earn high-quality backlinks today.
Thus, a blogger outreach strategy helps serve the purposes mentioned above to benefit your business by:
- Adding quality backlinks to your website—improving brand credibility and authority.
- Boosting your website’s organic traffic and improving Search Engine Optimization (SEO) results.
- Allowing you to build quality relationships with the experts in the industry and grow your network.
- Increasing the chances of natural link building for your website.
The top bloggers in the industry have a loyal following, which can ultimately become your customer base through an effective blogger outreach strategy. So, let’s see how to build one to get quality backlinks to your website.
Crafting The Best Blogger Outreach Strategy
Blogger outreach isn’t about sending a templated email to every influencer or blogger you come across with a large following.
Instead, the right blogger outreach requires putting the right effort into building a solid strategy for better results. Here are some critical steps you must follow to outreach the right bloggers in a better way.
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Find the right prospects
The first step to blogger outreach is finding relevant bloggers who can be a suitable match for your goals.
Sending bulk emails to random and generic bloggers is the worst mistake you can make if you want to earn high-quality backlinks and effectively track them using Backlink Management Tools.
Focus on finding niche bloggers relevant to your industry. For instance, if you own a digital marketing agency, reaching out to a beauty blogger or a fashion influencer will only waste your time and yield no good results.
Your services won’t interest their audience, no matter how big their following is.
Instead, you can better reach out and partner with bloggers like Neil Patel—who have a similar target audience to yours but aren't your direct competitors.
Considering the blogger’s relevance to your industry is the first key step to building an efficient blogger outreach strategy.
Here are some tips for finding suitable prospects:
- Run a simple Google Search by entering the target keyword in the search bar, like “Top food bloggers,” if your company sells food products or substitutes.
- Ensure the bloggers actively post and update their content and aren’t irregular.
- Leverage social media platforms like LinkedIn and Twitter to find their latest tweets and posts and ensure their content is relevant to your target audience.
- Hunt through blog directories like ontoplist.com and bloglovin.com to locate and match with the bloggers you’re looking for.
These tips will accelerate your search and help you find the right bloggers for backlink opportunities.
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Segment prospects into suitable categories
The number of followers a prospective blogger has isn’t the only important factor to consider.
Depending on your backlinking strategy and goals, even a blogger with a smaller yet niche and engaged audience can help yield better results for your business. This is why you need to segment your bloggers.
Segmenting your blogger’s list with as much granularity as possible helps you further niche down on the right bloggers you must outreach.
Here are the categories you can segment your bloggers into to better reach out to them:
- Mega prospects: These are the top bloggers and well-known faces of your industry and have a huge follower base.
They are either the face of their organization or achieved something tremendous and gained a huge following through their expertise.
- Micro prospects: While these aren’t as recognized as the mega prospects, they have substantial followers and consistently create content for their engaged audience.
Their audience is more likely to grow in the future, and you can easily get in touch with them through email.
- Mini prospects: These are the prospects who are extremely active and regularly engage in the conversations in your industry.
They explore new trends in the industry, regularly publish content, and attend network events and conferences to gain exposure and grow their audience.
So, now that we’ve seen how to find relevant prospects and segment them based on their authority and following—the next step is to find their email addresses to send your pitch.
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Find prospect’s email addresses
Finding your blogger’s email addresses is critical to getting good results.
You’d have to scrape through the internet and manually find relevant and updated email addresses a few years back—which was time-consuming and tiring.
However, today, you can find easy tools to help you find your prospect’s email addresses in a few seconds. Here are some of the email finder tools you can explore:
For instance, just by entering the company’s name—Hunter lets you find the relevant email addresses associated with the company.
Once you’ve got the right email addresses, it’s time for the most important blogger outreach step—sending the pitch.
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It’s time to outreach
The actual email you send to your prospective bloggers plays a huge role in your outreach campaign—and the key here is personalization.
Using a generic email template and sending the same emails to every prospect might seem easy, but you’re less likely to get replies from them, and your emails are more likely to get ignored by the bloggers.
Hence, writing a personalized email highlighting the collaboration purpose and the value proposition you offer to the blogger is important to make your pitch compelling.
Here are the elements of a good outreach email that converts:
#1 Subject line
Crafting an attractive and irresistible subject line is important to invoke curiosity and entice the blogger to open the email. In addition, it should talk about the purpose of your email in a crisp, clear, yet inviting way.
Some examples include:
- An exciting collaboration you don’t want to miss!
- The best guest posts to publish on your website!
Make sure you highlight the email’s intent in the subject line to avoid looking like spam and avoid confusion.
#2 Build a personal connection
When you reach out to bloggers, they will likely not know who you are. Starting with a humble greeting and a short introduction will help the prospect understand you better and where you’re coming from.
Furthermore, before getting into the message’s core—you can personalize your message by displaying your research about the blogger, like praising how consistent they’re on Twitter and your take on their recent tweet or admiring their recent blog and its level of research.
This will allow the prospect to understand your seriousness about this collaboration—resulting in higher response rates.
Bonus tip: connect with your prospects on social media platforms before email outreach and engage with their content to build connections and increase the chances of a response.
#3 Convey your message
Lastly, don’t forget to convey your core message during this process. It’s essential to provide a clear overview of the collaboration opportunity you’re willing to offer.
You can plug your recent top-performing content on Google to your prospect in a subtle manner with a unique selling proposition (USP) to make them understand why they should collaborate with you.
For example, instead of saying,
“You recently tweeted about email marketing. I wrote a similar post on that. Why don’t you take a look?’
You should be much more specific and say,
“I saw you tweeted a post about email marketing best campaigns, but I’d like to share a blog that goes much more in-depth with this topic and ranks on #0 position on Google. Please take a look.”
The second example provides a clear USP and makes the recipient read your content.
Thus, ensure you convey your message, add relevant USPs, talk about the value proportions, and conclude with an open-ended question to get more responses.
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Build lasting relationships
Many bloggers, especially macro bloggers, receive tons of emails and messages daily—and they might not reply to your pitch immediately.
In this case, timely follow-ups play a considerable role in getting their responses. However, it’s crucial to be careful and not spam their inbox with too many emails.
On the other hand, once you get a response from your prospect, ensure you continue to consistently engage with their content and focus on building lasting relationships.
This will allow you to reach out to them again in the future for other potential collaborations with mutual benefits.
Conclusion
Link building plays a huge role in search engine rankings as websites that rank in the #1 position on Google have 3.8 times more backlinks than the other search results.
It’ll help establish a credible brand image and grow your business’s network and organic traffic. However, building quality backlinks for the best SEO results requires an effective blogger outreach strategy.
So, implement the tips mentioned above for your next blogger outreach campaign to get the best SEO ROI for your business.
