Blogger Outreach: An Invaluable Link Building and Digital PR Tool

Blogger outreach is essentially a form of digital PR and, done right, it is an incredibly effective form of link building.

If you can hone your outreach tactics and cultivate relationships with bloggers, it can be one of the best ways to increase domain authority. 

The idea is that you reach out to bloggers in your same industry or niche and inform them of your current/existing content. 

The below guide will be a step-by-step analysis of how blogger outreach is done and how you can make it work for you. 

The first step in a blogger outreach campaign: Find the influential bloggers

You can’t reach out to anyone if you don’t know who they are, so your first step in putting together a list of bloggers to contact. 

There are a few ways to go about this. 

You can find a list of popular blogs on AllTop

Alltop is a curated list of blogs. 

As an example, if you were running a photography blog, you would go to AllTop and find their list of blogs in that niche. 

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AllTop is quite comprehensive and they have catalogued and organized a tremendous number of blogs and websites. 

Whether you’re looking for travel

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Or personal finance

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You can perform a Google search for industry/niche keywords

There are so many different SEO aids and tools out there that Google often gets overlooked as a powerful part of your arsenal. 

If you know how to use Google, however, you can find some amazing digital PR opportunities. 

This is how it’s done. 

Begin by searching for informational keywords in your niche

Let’s say that you run a blog about creating native gardens (planting native plants and creating native natural landscapes to make your garden eco-friendly). 

Some informational keywords surrounding that topic might include one such as: 

• Native garden landscaping
• Starting a native garden
• Attracting bees to your garden

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When you plug these search strings into Google, you will get a list of high authority websites: 

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When you are doing outreach, ignore the authority sites like Martha Stewart. It’s going to be next to impossible to make any inroads with these massive sites/companies. 

Instead, target the blogs that appear–places like Growitbuildit.com on the above list. 

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You can browse the first few pages of Google to find viable options for each informational search string. 

If you want to expand those opportunities even further, head down to the “related searches” section at the bottom of the results page and click on the options to find even more blogger outreach options. 

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You can ding bloggers using BuzzSumo

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Using BuzzSumo–one of the most popular and helpful content marketing platforms–is pretty straightforward. 

Search a broad keyword that describes your blog/niche. 

Using the rative garden example above, you might consider specifying “gardening” or “home and garden.”

Try to avoid using overly specific terms. The reason for this is that BuzzSumo looks for terms that people have in their Twitter bios. 

This means that when you search for something more general, you get a much larger list of bloggers to choose from than if you were to go for something specific. 

If you want to be more strategic about your blogger outreach, you can filter the results by the number of followers a blogger has. 

Or, you can filter by “retweet ratio.”

This is a useful metric because it lets you know how often a given blogger retweets (shares) people’s content. 

These are the bloggers most likely to share your content and get you noticed. A retweet ratio of five percent or more is a good minimum to set when selecting potential bloggers. 

You can search “best of” blogs as part of your blogger outreach strategy

This is a good way to ensure that any results you are getting are high authority, high-traffic sites that are going to maximize your exposure. 

To find these blogs, you need to use Google once again. 

Try searching for things like: 

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• Best blogs [keyword]

• Best [keyword] blogs [year]

• My favorite [keyword] blogs

• [keyword] blogs to follow

This is a great way to find blogs that you might otherwise never have come across. 

Step 2: blogger research

The second step in your blogger outreach campaign is to narrow down the list of names and sites you have compiled. 

As with almost any outreach list, you are very rarely going to be using all of the contacts you find. 

Some won’t be suitable for your purposes. Some might be too hard to contact. 

So the question is, then, who do you contact? 

Don’t skip this step. It is one that a lot of first-timers either forget to do or don’t think is important enough to do. 

Skipping over it can mean a ton of wasted time, deleted emails and potentially even ruined relationships. 

Spend a couple of minutes to understand who’s on your list and you will have a far greater success rate when you actually reach out to these people. 

You will be able to better tailor your pitches and personalize your outreach emails.

Creating your outreach spreadsheet

As with any good outreach campaign, it begins with a spreadsheet. 

A simple spreadsheet with 6 fields is enough to organize your outreach campaign. These would be: 

1. Website
2. Name
3. Social media followers
4. SEO authority
5. The average number of comments
6. Notes

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If you’re using something like BuzzSumo, you can skip the spreadsheet. Just add the people you find to your “People” list. 

Once you have those people, you can start filling in their “name” and “website” on the spreadsheet. 

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Once that’s done, you can fill in the remainder of the sheet. 

The social media followers

When accounting for the number of followers a blogger has, it’s a good idea to focus on the platform that is most important for your industry. 

If you’re a B2B SaaS company, you might decide that Linkedin or Twitter makes more sense for you. 

If you are B2C, maybe more of the influencers/leads in your niche are to be found on Instagram. 

Whatever that ideal platform is, check out the blogger’s profile and add their follower count to the social media column of your sheet. 

The SEO or domain authority of their site

This is especially important data if blogger outreach is part of your link building efforts. 

You can use a tool like Ahrefs Domain Rating (DR) score,

 or Semrush/MOZ Domain Authority (DA) score

Whichever metric you choose to use, each score gives you a pretty good idea of how much SEO value a particular site will contribute to your backlink profile (and move you up the Google rankings). 

The number of comments a blog has

There are a lot of bloggers out there that have a ton of people following them on social media. 

But when they publish a post, what do they get: silence? 

This matters because comments are a sign of community strength. This is especially important if you are considering a guest post on a website. 

A guest post on a smaller blog with a much more engaged community can get you far more blog traffic than a post on a larger blog with no engagement. 

Categorize your bloggers

After you’ve sorted your list of bloggers, it’s time to categorize them, essentially, by their quality. 

You will have level 1, 2, and 3 bloggers.

Level 1 is those bloggers that you would love to work with. They are the people that really dominate your industry and make the most waves. 

Your level 2’s are those that have a pretty good following and build a decent number of comments on their posts. They’ve probably been blogging for quite some time. 

Your level 3 bloggers are those that are just starting out, or never managed to quite take off. They still publish content on a regular basis, but they are probably half the size of the level 2 bloggers. 

Your blog might even be larger. 

Now that you have this data at hand, you can start categorizing your bloggers. 

You don’t have to spend too much time thinking about this step and the categories. It can be hard to quantify the value/quality of a blogger. 

If you are unsure about which category one should be placed in, either set them aside for further consideration or play it safe and put them in level 1. 

Regardless, doing all of this will help alot for the next two steps of the process. 

This is because it will take a lot more finessing with level 1 bloggers than level 3 ones.

This makes sense. The more popular a person and their blog is, the more soliciting they are going to be receiving on a regular basis, the harder it will be to get their attention. 

Step 3: Make your presence known

The cold hard truth of outreach is that how well-known you factors heavily into your open and response rate. 

If someone recognizes your name or website, they are much more likely to open an outreach email and respond. 

This is where putting yourself out there comes into play. You need to do this before you email them. 

This is how it’s done. 

The first step is following them on social media

This isn’t a groundbreaking tactic by any means, but it works. 

For all of the bloggers that you plan on reaching out to, find their social media channels and follow them. 

This is a particularly important first step if you plan on saying something like “I’m a big fan of your blog.” 

A lot of people read this kind of thing and want to see if you’re being sincere or simply trying to ingratiate yourself. 

Leave some likes and insightful comments

It’s always a good idea to leave a like or comment on a person’s content if you can.

This is especially the case if you have something genuinely insightful or helpful to offer. They’re in the same niche as you, so you already have that shared interest going for you. 

Don’t just comment something like “great post” or “I love your blog.” That’s what bots do. 

If you can show someone that you have truly engaged with their content, they are much more likely to take you seriously if and when you do reach out. 

Share their content 

Blogger outreach is all about making a good impression on the people you are trying to connect with. 

If you share someone’s content or website–especially if you genuinely have found it helpful–it can be a very good way to get on their radar. 

That said, most bloggers at the 1 or 2 level get their stuff shared on a regular basis. Sometimes you need to share three orr four pieces of their content before they take notice. 

The best way to share something is to not just share it, but to mention something specific about it. 

This helps you stand out. 

Send them an email telling them how much you enjoy their blog/content

This is a far more direct approach to blogger outreach, but done right, it can make a great impression on site owners. 

Here’s an example of how you might go about it: 

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You’ll notice that you don’t ask for anything specific. 

Just let them know you like what they do and move on. 

If they reply back, that’s great. If they don’t, it’s all good. 

You don’t want to ask for anything with this type of outreach because it would appear super disingenuous to the reader. 

Step 4: locate the contact information

At the end of the day, you need the right contact information if you want blogger outreach to succeed. 

There are several ways to find a person’s email address, below we will detail a couple of the most common and most effective. 

Hunter

Hunter is one of the most popular contact information finders out there 

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It provides accurate data (meaning accurate email addresses associated with active accounts) and there is a nice Chrome extension that lets you find email addresses within the browser. 

Voila Norbert

This is very similar to Hunter.io, just without the handy Chrome extension. 

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It does give you 50 leads for free, which is nice. 

Snov

Snov is very similar to both of the above two. 

Simply enter in your list of websites, and Snov will scrape the web for usable contact information. 

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A caveat 

It’s important to keep in mind that these tools are not infallible. It is not always going to be possible to find contact information associated with a particular website. 

People sometimes don’t want to be found (to avoid being bothered by marketers), or maybe the contact information that the tool finds is so out of date that it is no longer useful. 

When you use these kinds of tools for blogger outreach, you typically get a reliability indicator that lets you know how accurate the contact information is. 

Things like Snov and Hunter work on credits, and each time you ask the tool to gather contact information and, subsequently, use those contacts, you spend credits.

Step 5: contact the bloggers

Now that you have your list of bloggers, it’s time for the actual outreach part of the “blogger outreach” process.

To reiterate, the outreach component of blogger outreach will change based on the type of campaign you are executing. 

For instance, the way you do outreach for a guest blog post is quite different than how you would ask someone to share your content. 

Below we will delve into four of the most common outreach strategies:

• Guest posting
• Share requests
• Link requests
• Partnerships

Guest blog post

Guest posts are pieces of content that are hosted on someone else’s site. They get a guest post, you get a link back to your site. 

Guest posts are a crucial part of any solid blogger outreach strategy because they are very often explicitly solicited on the websites (i.e., there is a guest post page that encourages you to “write for” them or “become a contributor”). 

This means you have already eliminated the uncertainty factor–i.e., does this person want to hear from me at all?

Finding guest post opportunities

The first step is to narrow down the blogs on the list you have compiled that will accept pitches for guest posts. 

Determining what kind of content will work well on their blog

As mentioned, these sites will very often have a page on their site that tells you how to become a guest contributor and what is expected of you. 

These are the surest shots when it comes to your guest post outreach strategy. 

Other sites may not have this particular page, but you can tell that they do, in fact, accept guest post submissions through the presence of various different authors in their blog. 

If you are intent on getting a piece of guest content published on a site (you really like the site), but it’s not immediately clear they publish guest posts, you can try your luck and reach out anyways. 

But for this type of outreach, it’s best to focus your outreach efforts, first and foremost, on sites that will give you a good ROI on your time and effort. 

Determining what kind of content will work well

If you want someone to publish you, then you need to give them content they can publish. 

Look at the site’s blog and take note of the topics they cover and the formatting of their content. 

Once you think you can tailor your content and ideas to their site, reach out with a pitch. 

If you are doing outreach at scale (whether you’re doing it with outreach tools like Hunter or Snov) or sending outreach emails one by one, you will save yourself a lot of time if you have a template in place. 

A template might look like the following: 

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Bonus method

I also like to include some information regarding the SEO value of the post when I do my blogger outreach, and let the site owner know that I know what I’m doing when it comes to optimizing content for search engines. 

For instance, I might also include something like the following, in addition to the information I included in the above screenshot: 

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I’ve essentially provided them with some free SEO consulting here.

This finer detail/strategy is really only manageable when you are reaching out to a smaller number of sites. 

Trying to provide this kind of bespoke detail to dozens of outreach emails can take too much time. 

Ask influential bloggers to share your content

Of course, doing this is easier said than done. 

Influential bloggers get bombarded with these kinds of requests all the time and have to ignore a bunch of them for the sake of practicality. 

This means that you really need to be offering up something valuable (especially if you don’t have an existing relationship with this person) if you want them to share your content with their followers. 

A good script for this sort of outreach email looks something like the following: 

You should never ask someone to share your content. It’s the same as begging people for likes or follows on Instagram. 

It’s disingenuous and annoying. 

If someone likes your content, they might just share it with their audience. 

And, as always, make sure that your subject line is straight to the point and convinces someone to open your email. 

It should be personalized enough so that the recipient knows they aren’t just part of some massive automated email campaign and informative enough that it gives them an idea of what’s in store once they open the message. 

This is how you improve your open rate and actually get read.

Try to land big links on high authority blogs

With this method, what you are doing is essentially trying to get a writer or site owner to include a link to your already published content in theirs. 

The objective is to convince them that adding that link will improve their content and their user experience.

You can either suggest a place for the link to go or, you can suggest that they replace an existing link with yours, provided you offer something better (i.e., more up-to-date and comprehensive than what is already being used). 

A good script for this sort of email outreach might look something like this: 

It can also be a good idea to suggest the text leading up to and after the anchor text as well as, of course, the anchor text itself. 

When you ask for a link insertion, even if your content truly is that much better than what an article is already linking to, you are still asking someone to exert some effort. 

If you do all of the legwork for them–give them the text and anchor text–all they have to do is plug it into their article. 

Voila!

Conclusion

That is an end-to-end, step-by-step blogger outreach strategy that you can put into practice on your own today. 

Your blogger outreach game, to a large degree, will determine how much exposure and how many links you are able to build organically. 

Things like influencer marketing and the like can help, but the foundation of a good digital PR marketing strategy is blogger outreach that promotes actual beneficial content. 

Putting all of this into practice–building relationships, paying for and using the outreach tools, creating the guest post content, etc.--is easier said than done. 

It’s why a lot of companies choose to work with experienced link builders that know how to create and execute outreach campaigns while avoiding a lot of common outreach pitfalls. 

Whatever way you decide to go, hopefully, the above post has provided a road map that helps you get your content in front of more sites and more eyes.