bloggingIf you spend more time building relationships with other relevant bloggers you will get more traffic, shares, sales and much more!

If you just write content and hope people will come you’re in for a surprise!

In this detailed article, we look at the blogger outreach process and go through a selection of tools that can help.

What is Blogger Outreach?

Blogger outreach is mainly about building relationships.  It’s reaching out to other bloggers to find out how you can help each other.  To be successful you need a good blogger outreach strategy.

Blogger outreach can be done online or you might meet bloggers in other ways such as attending conferences.

Of course, you may reach out to sites where you’ve no intention of building a relationship and you just want a link to your content.  This is still useful if you provide really good content.  People will link to great content and they want to know about it!  But your success really depends on your approach!

A selection of great bloggers
A selection of cool bloggers

When I outreach what do you want?

There are many different reasons you may do blogger outreach.  Here is an example:

a). Guest Post – You see that they allow guest posts on their site so you reach out to offer a guest post.

b). Sponsored Posts – You want them to write a post about your product or service for a fee.

c). Build a relationship – You reach out to build a relationship and you have no short-term agenda.  The longer-term agenda is that you will get to know the person and then end up helping each other, sharing each others content, etc.

d). Invitation – You may reach out to influential bloggers to guest post on your blog, appear on your podcast or webinar or just contribute to an article.

e). Generate awareness of your content – If you provide good content relevant to the blogger’s audience they may be interested in reading, sharing or linking to your content.

The Free Approach to Blogger Outreach (time consuming and a little painful but free)

We’ll outline some useful blogger outreach tools later on in this post, but there is a cost involved.  There’s also a free option for doing blogger outreach, but it’s more time consuming and is a manual process.  So here’s the manual process:

1. Find People for your list

Install the Moz toolbar on your browser.  When you are performing a search you will see the domain and page rank for any sites you come across. The domain rank specifies how important the website is with a rating from 0 to 100.  The higher the number the more important it is.    The page rank is a similar ranking but just based on the actual page you see in the search results.

Perform a search on Google based on the important keywords for your business.  What appears in the top results are sites that Google thinks are the most important for those keywords.  These are the ones that you want to start reaching out to.

Moz Authority
The Moz toolbar will show you the domain and page rank for sites

Starting noting the sites in an Excel spreadsheet.  Keep a note of the website, domain rank, when you reached out, why you reached out, response, and anything else you can think of.

2.  Doing the outreach

Create a series of templates, write out your emails and if your email client supports this then create templates that you can re-use. This saves a lot of time.  On Gmail, there is an add-on called ‘Canned Responses’.  When you set this up you can create a series of templates you can select from when you write an email.

To set this up select the ‘settings’ option (top right) and then select labs.

Gmail Canned Responses
With this plugin you can save your email templates to re-use again

Spend some time on each person you are emailing. Make sure you make the email personal, relevant, short and make sure you show that you have put some effort in. Record your results in your spreadsheet!

NOTE:  I do not recommend that you blast out the same email to everyone.  A personal email is important but sometimes you have a paragraph or two that is the same for every email and that’s why a template is useful (e.g. details about your company).

The above blogger outreach process will work.  It will take you a lot of time but you will make progress.

What are the blogger outreach tools that can help?

There are a wide variety of Blogger Outreach tools.  For this article, we’ve picked 3 that offer different types of functionality and different pricing.  Going through the 3 tools below will also help you understand the process.

Note:  There are also blogger outreach services where you can get people to build a list for you e.g. Taskdrive.

1.  InkyBee – Blogger Discovery and Campaign Management at an affordable price

Inkybee is a very affordable blogger outreach tool with a starting price of $19 per month.  The main features it provides are:

  • Blog search based on a database of over 1 million blogs – You can set up searches or add a ‘discovery job’ which automatically finds the latest and most relevant blogs.
  • Campaign Management – You can create a campaign and track your outreach process through the campaign. Once you add the relevant blogs to the list as you interact with the blog you can add your interactions to their profile (e.g. followed them on Twitter).
  • Google Analytics integration –  Through integration with Google Analytics, you can monitor traffic back from the blogs you are targeting.

How does it work?

When you want to reach out to bloggers you need to create a list based on keywords you define.  You can set up a discovery job which searches for new blogs matching your criteria on an ongoing basis or just run a search.

For the search, you use you can search through blogs for mentions of particular keywords, for posts that are ‘tagged’ with keywords or just search for blogs that are focused on a particular topic (e.g. the title of the blog has the keywords).

Here is an example of results returned when you run a search like this.

Inky Bee Search
The results based on a keyword research

When the results are displayed you can do the following:

  • Filter the results based on the ‘Domain rank’.  This is a proprietary ranking system developed by a company called ‘Moz’ and it’s a good gauge of how important the blog is.  The rank is from 0 to 100 and the higher the number the better.
  • Filter based on the last blog post – If this blog has not posted for months it may not be as relevant as a blog that has posted recently.
  • Add to list – If you think the blog is an ideal candidate for your outreach process you can add it to a list.

When you view your full list you can view and filter on a lot more detail.  Here’s an example of another list based on the search ‘social media tools’.

Inkybee Detailed list
A lot of great detail provided on each blog and you can sort based on any column

When you have your final list of blogs this forms the basis of your campaign.  The campaign summary shows you the list of blogs with the overall campaign stats.

Campaign Monitoring
Based on your targeted list you can manually track your interactions and automatically track traffic to your site

For each of the blogs on your list, you can track interactions with the blog.  For example, if you mentioned a blogger in a tweet you can add this on to the campaign.

Inkybee Relationship Status
You can manually track your interactions with the blogs

The campaign can also be linked to your Google Analytics account so it will start to track if you get any traffic to your site from the blogs in question.

Summary

This is a very affordable blogger outreach tool. Ideally, it would have a much bigger database of blogs and more options related to campaign tracking but the database is expanding and there are plans for more campaign tracking functionality.

2. Group High – Extensive Content Discovery Engine based on 13 million blogs

Group High outreach marketing software has an extensive discovery engine which consists of 13 million blogs and can be used to automate research and track engagement.

  • Extensive discovery engine – Group High has an extensive, ever-growing database, of 13 million blogs.
  • Significant detail picked up on each blog – When it retrieves blogs it retrieves an impressive amount of detail on a lot of the blogs (e.g. Twitter details, Facebook page, link to contact form, contact page, recent posts, etc).
  • Crowdsourcing of contact information – Over 60k contacts are updated monthly by users of the system and everyone gets access to this.  This means you get a lot of accurate up to date information.
  • Activity management – ability to track activities on each of the blogs you track.
  • Keyword monitoring so you can monitor mentions of keywords in any blogs
  • Enter in a URL where you have been mentioned and Group High will track comments, shares, likes, etc.
  • Reporting – Very good reports available on results of any outreach campaign

How does it work?

1. Set up your list and/or group

In Group High you create a list and this is where you add relevant blogs.  You can also have a group and have many lists within the group.  For example, if I wanted to track social media tools I might have a group ‘social media tools’ and have a list for ‘social media management tools’, ‘social media monitoring tools’, etc.

2. Find blogs to add to the list

When I have the list set up I perform a search on the blogs.  Here is a sample of the results returned based on social media tools.

Grouphigh List
Perform a search to find the most relevant blogs
    1. Over 10,000 blogs were returned but out of them 36 blogs were identified as ones that focus a lot on social media tools.
    1. If you want to add items to a list you click the ‘star’
    1. Social media profile details are returned
  1. The latest blog post titles are retrieved

3.  Research your list

When you ‘star’ items, which adds them to the list,  Group High will retrieve more detail on the blog and display this.  You can do a lot of filtering based on the list and you can also view a record for each individual item on the list.

Here is a selection the columns you can add/remove to your list:

  • Blog Information – Most commented topics, frequency of posting
  • Traffic Stats – Alexa rank, Unique visitors (retrieved from compete.com)
  • Social Network stats – Klout score, Facebook Fans, Twitter ID
  • SEO Status – Domain rank, inbound links
  • Tactics – Giveaways, contests (this shows the blogs that use these tactics)
  • Outreach – last activity, outreach stage

The full list is very impressive and extremely useful.  When you open up an individual record this is the type of information you see:

GroupHigh Individual Record
View details and track interactions with each contact

4. Performing the blogger outreach

Group High does not have any facilities for email templates and for performing the outreach directly within the tool.  You can, however, track and monitor the activity of the outreach.   You can also view the activity stage.

Group High Monitoring

You can set up ongoing monitoring to track any blogs in your list that mention specific keywords.  This is useful to keep track of any new mentions that might be very relevant to your business.

Grouphigh Monitoring
Set up the keywords you want to track, keywords you don’t want to track etc.

Grouphigh Tracking

If you get mentioned in any blog posts and you want to track engagement on that blog post you can set this up in Group High.  It will track how many comments you get, Facebook updates, Twitter updates, etc.

Summary

Group High has a very extensive database and retrieves some very detailed information on the blogs.  The filtering available for the results is extremely useful.  Their campaign management is very basic but the strength of the discovery engine makes this a very compelling option.

I think it’s very smart that they crowdsource some of the content.  Their user base adds in various details for blogs that they monitor and this information is shared amongst all their users.  This is something that should be adopted by all blogger outreach tools.  You will never get a complete database so crowdsourcing will help!

3. OutreachPlus – Blogger outreach management

OutreachPlus is a comprehensive email outreach tool to help you manage your blogger outreach campaigns. The focus of this tool is not on discovering blogs, but rather on performing the most effective and personalized outreach. Its functionalities cover everything from setting up a campaign and sending automated personalized outreach emails, to tracking the results of individual emails and campaigns.

The main features of OutreachPlus are as follows:

  • A 4-step campaign wizard – You can create your outreach campaign in four easy steps: choose campaign type, upload prospects, and then create emails based on one of the available high-performing templates.
  • Advanced email personalization – Use mail merge capability (standard, custom, conditional mail merge logic) to personalize every outreach email you send.
  • Outreach campaign automation – The tool provides an automation capability that detects email opens, replies, link clicks, etc. and triggers personalized emails to prospects based on their actions.
  • OutreachPlus Inbox – Connect multiple email accounts to OutreachPlus and manage all responses in a single inbox.
  • Campaign analytics – You can track the progress of campaigns, view prospect status, and monitor the performance of your templates.
  • Task Management – Create roles for team members, assign permissions, and assign tasks.

 How does it work?

1. Create a Campaign

The first step is to choose a campaign type in OutreachPlus based on your blogger outreach goals. Here are the available campaign types:

Campaign types in OutreachPlus

Next, you will name your campaign and move on to the next step to add your contacts.

Make sure to sign up for a trial.

2. Build your list

You have 3 main options to build your target list:

  • Import your list – Import your list of prospects from a CSV file.
  • Add manually – Add new prospects manually.
  • Choose a list – If you already used OutreachPlus, you can choose to send this new campaign to an existing list of relevant prospects.

3. Create your outreach emails

When you perform blogger outreach it’s likely that you’ll resend a lot of similar emails. To make this process less painful, you can use one of the email templates in OutreachPlus, or you can create your own template. Here you can also add merge codes to personalize your emails with your recipients’ names, domains, page title, or other customized content.

Once you are happy with your initial message, you can go ahead and set up your follow-up sequence that will be sent automatically to unresponsive prospects.

4.  Start your outreach

Now that you are ready to send out your blogger outreach campaign, OutreachPlus will offer you several options:

You can decide to send your campaign immediately, schedule it to go out on a specific date/time, or preview and fine-tune each email individually.

5. Monitor progress

Once your campaign is live, you will be able to track its progress in the Dashboard. You can monitor the performance of your campaign in terms of open rates, response rates, and click rates so you can optimize for better results in the future.

Summary

OutreachPlus is a really great tool for managing the blogger outreach process. It doesn’t have a full discovery engine, but the if you are going to do a lot of blogger outreach, this is a very effective tool for managing it.

Final Comments

If you are producing content it’s really important to have a blogger outreach program in place.  It’s not enough just to write your content you need to get out there and promote it.

You can do a direct approach and use the blogger outreach tools or go indirectly and find people on social media channels like Twitter using tools such as Twtrland.

I have outlined some tools and some useful practices to go directly to the bloggers.  Will you use any of the blogger outreach tools I mentioned?  What is your outreach process?


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