The Components of a Successful Blogger Outreach Campaign

Anyone can promote a blog. Outreach, however, is what sets the professionals apart from the amateurs.

Like writing a blog post, you need to research, plan, and execute your approach to email outreach.

To help you increase traffic and keyword rankings, here's what makes a successful outreach campaign.

How to Create a Blogger Outreach Campaign

An email outreach campaign has six stages:

1. Reseach target audience
2. Plan a strategy
3. Create a list of engaging blog titles
4. Create a list of relevant sites
5. Pitch guest post to the site admins
6. Create a high-quality piece of content

Here's what it involves:

1. Research your target audience

A common mistake when doing email outreach is not doing enough research on who you're pitching to. Of course, you can send the same generic emails to admins of relevant sites and some will say yes. However, you will be much more successful in getting a backlink from a high authority site if your content is high quality and the outreach email is personalized.

Researching your audience will help you identify:

• Who they are
• Their interests and goals
• Their needs
• Their sources of information

Doing research on your audience will help you create engaging topics that will be appealing to your target site's own audience. The result will be more brand awareness and valuable referral traffic for your site.

Where to research your target audience for blogger outreach:

• Relevant Reddit threads
• Quora answers
• Niche forums
• Competitors' blogs
• Niche blogs
• Social media engagement

2.  Create a blogger outreach strategy

Now that you have all the information you need, it's time to set a plan of action.

First, you will need to set some goals and milestones so you can track the progress of your outreach campaign.

For example, you can start by deciding how many blog posts you need published each month in order to see results.

You should also set some guidelines, such as:

• Targeting sites with certain metrics (organic traffic, DA, DR, CF, TF, etc.)
• Yes/No considering sponsored posts
• Yes/No interested in exchanging guest posts
• Yes/No to accepting no-follow links
• What pages and keywords to target
• Who is responsible for creating the content
• How are you going to track the project (Google Docs, project management tool, etc.)

3. Create a list of engaging blog titles

With so many pieces of content consumed every minute, it can be a challenge to find topics that will stick out. However, if you’ve done your due diligence and researched your target audience, you should have an idea of what the readers in your niche might be interested in.

Since guest blogging is so popular, you can find a lot of great blog posts on how to write effective guest post titles that attract clicks and shares.

4. Finding relevant sites

Effective blogger outreach campaign should not revolve solely on link building for the sake of link building.

Creating content that adds value and aimed at your target audience should be just as important.

Since you are already investing a considerable amount of time on blogger outreach, target only high authority sites in your niche. This will get you relevant referral traffic that can be even more valuable than the authority increase you will get from a simple backlink. This will pair lead generation with the SEO benefit.

Here are three ways to find relevant sites for blogger outreach:

• Using advanced Google search operators
• Using outreach tools
• Analyzing your competitors' backlink profiles

Using advanced Google search operators

If you are doing a small blogger outreach project, you might get away with only using Google to find guest posting opportunities. However, you should still learn how to use advanced search operators.

Many sites will accept content from guest contributors. In many cases, those sites will have keywords like “guest posting guidelines”, “write for us”, “guest author”, or “guest contributor”.

Here are some examples of search queries you can use:

• Keyword + “write for us”
• keyword + “guest post guidelines”

There are actually a lot of great articles that focus solely on this topic. If you're interested, here are some additional tips on how to use Google Search to find guest blogging opportunities.

Using Outreach Tools

While searching for guest post opportunities is fine in the beginning, you will quickly find it can be incredibly time-consuming and that it gets harder and harder to find new opportunities.

Luckily, there are outreach tools that cut down on time spent. Here is an in-depth review of the best blogger outreach tools.

They all work based on keywords. You simply enter the keywords you are interested in and they search for sites that are ranking for the target keywords. You can quickly inspect the list, delete the sites you are not interested in, write the pitch, and start your outreach campaign from there.

Here are some additional benefits that come with using an outreach tool:

• You can inspect websites faster to pull the latest metrics (DA, DR, number of social media followers, etc.)
• Segment opportunities in lists so it is easier to send personalized pitches
• Blogger outreach templates you can tailor for your campaigns
• Managing communications is easier, especially if you are running multiple campaigns and/or projects at the same time
• Some can even track opens/click on your emails so you can easily A/B test your pitches and subject lines

Inspecting Competitor’s Backlink Profile

This approach is actually simpler than it sounds.

You only need two things for this:

1. A tool capable of analyzing website’s backlink profile like Ahrefs or SEMRush
2. A list of your competitors that are using content marketing/blogger outreach

The goal is to compare their backlink profile with your own and see if there are any websites they have a backlink you don't have yet.

5. Write personalized pitch(es)

Anyone that manages a blog has certainly come across some horrible guest post pitches. From obvious templates to others with spelling errors, there are many mistakes people make in their outreach campaigns.

Since outreach takes time, people will try to cut corners. The first thing on the list is to reduce the time spent on writing pitches.

Which often results in something like this:

What people don’t realize is that having generic guest post pitches drastically reduces their success rate. That means you have to contact more websites than you would otherwise if you personalized your pitches.

Here are some elements you can look to personalize:

• Address the person you are reaching out to by name
• Mention the name of their blog or refer to a specific post that you like
• Adjust your topic suggestions based on the site
• Adjust the pitch according to the instructions in their guest posting guidelines

Here is an example of a guest post pitch that can work for almost any niche:

6. Create a high-quality piece of content

People make a lot of promises in their pitches; unique content, personal insights, screenshots, X amount of words, valuable advice, etc.

The problem is that definition of quality content isn’t written in stone and site admins have different requirements.

If they do not have any guidelines, here are the main characteristic of a great guest post:

• No matter how complex the subject is, it should be explained as simply as possible
• The post should have a flow
• No grammar and spelling errors
• Stats and facts must be backed up with relevant sources
• Provide useful information
• It should include media components (pictures, videos, graphs, etc.)

Do the work

Blogger outreach is not the most exciting part of marketing, but it's an integral part of a successful content marketing strategy and one of the most effective link building methods.

The amount of effort you put into your blogger outreach campaigns will directly impact its success rate.

So keep yourself and your team on track and you will see more organic traffic, referral traffic, and leads.