How to improve your blog marketing outreach: 11 tips

What Is Outreach

The goal behind blogger outreach is to leverage the following and social influence of a blogger to promote your brand or offer. This allows you to reach a very targeted audience across different channels and make use of a blogger’s credibility. Most often, such a collaboration includes an incentive, which can be agreed upon during negotiations.

Blogger outreach comes in a variety of forms, depending on how much exposure you need. For example, you can ask a blogger to share a backlink to your blog and feature your offer, write a review about your brand, or even run a joint event.

What are the benefits of blogger outreach? By partnering with the right blogger, you will gain access to a large readymade audience, drive traffic to your site, grow your following, improve your link profile, and more. As blogs are one of the top five sources of credible information on the internet, it’s safe to say that blogger outreach can be one of the most efficient marketing strategies to achieve these objectives.

If you are wondering whether blogger outreach is right for your business, do some research in your niche to determine whether the audience there listens to the views of influencers. In some industries, such as travel, lifestyle, and fashion, bloggers have the utmost power to influence purchasing decisions. So, if your business falls into one of those categories, you can safely use outreach.

11 Blogger Outreach Best Practices

Here are 11 steps to make your blogger outreach strategy a success:

1. Prospect the Right Blogger

The first important step is to do research and determine which bloggers are the right fit for your brand. There are thousands of bloggers with different levels of reach. The larger the audience, the less likely the blogger is to respond. So, you may want to focus most of your efforts on mid-level bloggers, but also send your pitch to a few top-level influencers just to try your luck.

How to find bloggers to promote your product or brand? You can start by exploring influencing voices within your niche on social media using relevant hashtags or Googling “top blogger” and “top niche” lists.

Another approach includes researching blogger outreach software, such as NinjaOutreach, Influence.co, or Bloggeries.com, which provide access to hundreds of thousands of influencers ready to collaborate. You can learn more how to contact bloggers and find more blog outreach services at our blog.

Once you handpick a few candidates, make sure to read their blogs and understand what kind of message they share with their audience. Start by dropping a few comments on their blogs or across social media and try to engage in conversation. This will help you gain attention, which will make the influencers more likely to meet you halfway on your requests.

When building your outreach strategy, remember Pareto’s law: 20% of your efforts will yield 80% of your results. This can lead to 20% of outreach targets generating most of your outcomes, so it’s okay if not all of your prospects respond.

2. Find an Actual Email Address

While too many marketers automate their outreach when searching for contact details, it’s worth spending time to manually research your prospect and find their actual email address. Bloggers may have several email addresses, but you shouldn’t go with the first one you see. Instead, try to discover a personal email address they’ll actually check. This will prove your serious intentions to the bloggers you’re reaching out to.

How can you find the right email address? Here are a few strategies:

Use email discovery tools that monitor the internet and help you find your prospects’ email addresses. For example, Hunter, FindThatLead (available as browser extension as well), Name2Email, and more.
Guess. Many email addresses follow similar patterns: they may include the blogger’s first and last name plus a domain (for example, name@domain.com). You can verify the address right in your mailbox. Simply type the potential address in the recipient field and hover the cursor over it. A pop-up will appear if the address has a Google profile. If this does not help, you can run another check by searching for the exact match of your best guess on Google or another search engine to see if it was mentioned anywhere on the Web.

Subscribe to your prospect’s newsletter. Oftentimes, bloggers send out a newsletter. By subscribing to this newsletter, you’ll receive their email address, which will allow you to engage in conversations and start forging relationships.
Reach out to bloggers on social media. Many influencers are easy to reach on social media, so you can drop them a line and ask for their email address on one of their social networks.

3. Write a Catchy Subject Line

A subject line is the first thing that your recipient will see. So, it will determine whether your email gets opened. Try to write a line that is clear, right to the point, and allows you to pitch your offer in one sentence. Here are some of the best practices to get your email opened:

Be personal by using the recipient’s name, site name, or location
Ask a question to start a conversation
Pique curiosity with a slightly vague line
Use numbers
Start with action verbs

4. Be Personal

The next important step is to write a pitch and present your offer. For example, you can use the blogger outreach email template below to create your own pitch:

Introduce yourself and your brand
Demonstrate why you are a good fit
Reference a post you would like to add a backlink to
Share your opinion about said post
Pitch your post and highlight the value it brings
Ask the blogger for feedback

At this stage, it is important to show the recipient that you’ve thoroughly studied their work and have something valuable to share. Make sure to personalize your email and avoid being overly generic. For instance, use the recipient’s name and site name and mention things you’ve learned on their blog. This will show that you’ve done your research and can be taken seriously.

A common mistake is to use flattery in hopes it will get you a backlink. Instead, saying meaningful things will show your serious intentions and benefit you in the process of forging relationships.

If you have already established a connection over social media or other channels, refer to said connects to show the recipient you’re no stranger.

5. Create a Good Outreach Excuse

When crafting a pitch, be sure to demonstrate the benefits the blogger will get out of your cooperation. Pitches starting with “I wrote a similar article, could you link to it in your post” won’t get you far, as they prove you didn’t properly study the post and its author.

Instead, try to highlight the points that drew your attention within the blogger’s post and how they relate to or contradict with your article. In this way, you are giving the blogger the chance to make their work deeper and more comprehensive, which can only be favorable to them.

6. Pitch the Right Topic

As you can see, you need to get serious about choosing a topic to pitch by picking one that corresponds to the blogger’s message and resonates with their audience. What you should do is carefully research the blog you’re interested in and see what types of posts are published there, what kind of message the blogger presents, which niche they work in, etc. Then, pitch two to three topics that could be a good fit and allow the blogger to choose.

7. Refer to Recent Posts

When looking through posts to pitch, make sure to choose only recent content. It’s likely that the blogger forgot about their older articles and won’t be very interested in updating them. Recent posts, on the other hand, are easy outreach targets and are more likely to get you a backlink.

8. Share Your Best Posts

You only get one chance to make a first impression, so be sure to pitch your best content. How can you define which posts are truly good and which you just think are good? Here, you can rely on social proof, such as the number of shares, likes, comments, etc., which prove that your post generated engagement.

9. Add Value

To inspire the blogger to link back to your post, you need to bring value in your pitch. For example, offer information that is useful to bloggers, such as the results of a relevant study, etc. If your post shares a unique perspective or unusual angle, be sure to highlight this novelty.

Another way to add value is to feature the blogger in your own post. It’s hard to resist checking out content that talks about you, so, for example, include a quote from their post, talk about things you’ve learned from reading their blog or share a positive experience that you had with their brand.

10. Share Your Plan for Further Promotion

While most marketers stop there, you can go one step further and create a plan for further promotion. Explain to the blogger how you plan to help them drive traffic after publication. For example, you can share their post on social media, engage in conversations with readers, and show commitment by any other means. This will also help keep your relationship going and will open the door to further cooperation.

11. Follow Up, Once

For a variety of reasons, even a perfect pitch might not be replied to straightaway. Bloggers are oftentimes busy people and may be receiving hundreds of similar requests. Your email might get lost, end up in the spam folder, or the blogger may simply forget to respond in time.

In this case, after three to four days, you can send a follow-up email asking about the status of your offer. For instance, you may write something like “just wanted to make sure you got my email” or “a quick follow up in case you missed my pitch”, etc. One follow up would suffice, and if you don’t get a response, it’s time to move on.