10 Steps to an Epic Blogger Outreach Campaign

In the digital race to the top of the SEO ladder, what are you doing to make sure your blog doesn’t lag behind and become covered in dust?

Today there are almost 40 million bloggers in the U.S. and unfortunately, creativity and genuine writing skill are no longer enough. In order to market and keep your blog ahead of the game, blogger outreach should be one of your biggest focuses.

Blogger outreach is the process of connecting with other bloggers in an effort to establish a collaborative marketing bond, publish a guest post or to push a piece of content on their site.

Before you can even begin your outreach campaign, you have to do the most time consuming part—research who to pitch to. Here is what needs to be determined before launching the campaign:

• Does the site even take guest posts?
• What is their domain authority?
• Do they have a lot of social media followers?
• What is their email address?
• What is the voice of the site?

The research can be made easier with blogger outreach tools like GroupHigh. GroupHigh is a custom search engine that filters out dead blogs and puts blog metrics, social media statistics, contact information and other useful categories in a spreadsheet. It shaves hours off any blogger outreach campaign.

Once you’ve filtered out and made a list of who you want to contact you are ready to go through the 10 steps of an epic blogger outreach campaign.

Step 1: Narrow down your topic and content in to one clear and concise mission statement for your campaign. Write it down somewhere where you will see it often throughout your entire blogger outreach process. It’s good to say centered and on track.

Step 2: Craft the body of your pitch. Keep it short and sweet since successful bloggers get a lot of requests for guest posting and content pushing. State what you are offering and why it’s unique and worthy of space on their blog.

Step 3: Craft a custom “lead” and conclusion for each individual contact. Bloggers know a cookie cutter pitch when they see one. Read a few posts on their blog to get a feel for the tone and what they are looking for.

Step 4: Edit your pitch. Nothing turns a blogger off more than typos and an unorganized pitch— it’s supposed to convey your writing style and skills.

Step 5: Come up with something better to write in the subject line than “guest post.” You need to make your email stand out.

Step 6: Create a spreadsheet of everyone that you pitched to making sure to leave categories open for the ones that accept your post so that you can track how well it does.

Step 7: Engage in the social media of the bloggers with whom you are reaching out to. This will make them realize that you can offer collaborative social media efforts and that you are savvy.

Step 8: After you send your pitch follow up with a tweet that you sent them an email. This lessens the chances of your pitch getting lost in the mix.

Step 9: If it’s been a few days and you haven’t heard anything, give it one last attempt. Send a simple follow up email asking if they have any questions about you or the content you want to write or push. If you still don’t hear back, you have to give up.

Step 10: Be patient and wait. Sometimes it takes bloggers a while to respond. But if you’ve crafted a good pitch and you have a good idea, you are going to hear back from a lot of them. The patience will also come in handy when waiting to see the results of your campaign.

Speaking of results, make sure you keep track of every post. It’s good to know which sites bring you the most traffic. You can mimic the type of post for other sites and offer to write for them again.

This should go without saying, but make sure the content is original. Duplicate content will not only anger the blogger but it can also irk Google and harm your page rank.

Author Bio: Kristen Matthews is freelance writer and content marketer based out of Boulder Colorado. She loves to write and enjoy life through travel, good food, creativity and interesting people. Contact her for any writing requests at KristenMarie22@msn.com.