7 Evergreen Tips for Better Blogger Outreach

Do you want a larger audience for your business? One effective way to do that is through effective blogger outreach.

Here’s the truth:

You’re struggling to grow your blog’s traffic, increase leads generation, and grow your revenue because you’re not reaching out to other bloggers.

Whether you want more customers or better brand awareness, a blogger outreach could help you achieve your aim.

According to a study by BlogHer, 81% of people trust information and advice they get from blogs and 61% have made a purchase based on recommendations from blogs.

But a blogger outreach is more than just copying a template and sending it to hundreds of influential bloggers. You’ll have little success this way and a lot of frustration along with it.

Influential bloggers have built their reputation on a lot of hard work over the years.

You should at least pay attention when you need a favor from them. That said, getting featured on influential blogs is possible.

People do it every day. But how?

In the rest of this post, you’ll learn 7 tips that will help you to get better results from your blogger outreach.

Let’s dive in.

Table of Contents

Find influential bloggers in your niche

Whatever industry you are, there are thousands, probably millions, of blogs. Many of these blogs are not places you want to appear.

Your first task is to find influential bloggers and blogs that you’ll want your business to appear.

Reaching out to the wrong bloggers will add little to your business even if they end up featuring your content on their homepages.

It’s crucial to find influencers who have loyal followings and friends in your industry. You also have to know if they accept guest posts on their blog.

How do you find these bloggers?

Google Search

One of the best sources to find influential bloggers is through Google search. Sometimes, this could be a direct search or even an indirect search.

If you search about various topics in your industry and some blogs always appear in your search results, this shows that these blogs are authoritative blogs. You can identify these blogs and then search for the bloggers behind them.

An example of such a blog is Moz when you search for terms in search engine optimization. You can then search for its founder. One of them is the ever-charming Rand Fishkin.

Another way to find influential bloggers is to search for influential blogs in your industry. When you find these blogs, you can then identify the blogger or bloggers behind them.

The most direct way is to search for your industry influential bloggers on Google. You can input a search term like “top health bloggers” or similar terms applicable to your industry.

This will give you a list of people you want to follow up with later. Below is an example of a search for “top health bloggers:”

LinkedIn Search

This is a social media platform for professionals. If there’s an influential blogger in your industry, they’re probably on LinkedIn.

You can search for “industry name + blogger” and you’ll find top professionals.

Twitter Search

Another platform where you can find many influential bloggers is Twitter. This is a platform where people post their content and interact with their followers. Many influential bloggers use this platform to interact with fellow influential bloggers and tweet their ideas.

You can use the search option on this platform by searching for relevant industry terms or hashtags.

When you search for a term like “Digital marketer” on Twitter, you get results that showcase industry experts.

Reading Industry blogs

When you follow up with some industry blogs you know, you get to know more influential bloggers. In some ways, there might be a mention of these bloggers in a post. In some other cases, they might have a guest post on the industry blogs you read.

Below is a post by Adam Connell where he mentions Search Engine Land’s Danny Sullivan who is an SEO influencer.

These are few ways you can find influential bloggers to contact for your blogger outreach.

Read and comment on their blogs

After finding influential bloggers, the next step is to get to know them. And that’s to read their blog. One thing I’ll tell you is that not every influential blogger will be the right fit for your brand.

You can only know that when you read their blog.

By reading their blog, you get to know them more. You also get to understand their style of writing.

If you find that their style of writing and messages are suitable for your brand, then you should start connecting with them by dropping your comments on their blogs.

Comments are one of the effective ways of building trust with bloggers.

In a way, you’re making their posts more valuable as people see comments as an important sign of engagement. An influential blogger will notice you when you drop comments on their posts.

However, I’m not talking about two-word comments like “great post!” You have to make your comment insightful. There should be a piece of evidence you’ve really read the post and you should also add your ideas that other visitors can gain from.

When you do this consistently, you begin to gain attention from these influencers even before you need their favor.

For instance, Kevin Duncan was able to get an invitation to write a guest post on Smart blogger. How? By dropping useful comments on their posts and sharing them on social media.

See? You might not even have to ask for it if you build the connection well.

Apart from reading an influencer’s blog post, you should also follow them on social media. When they bring up new ideas or ask questions on social media, you can always contribute and engage in interactions with them.

Added to that, you can share their posts on social media and tag them when you do so.

In a case where a blog has no provision for comments, you can still get your comments across to the influencer on their social media page. You can do that when they share their posts on social media.

They raise the profile of the influential blogger. This way, you’re already giving to an influential blogger before you ask for anything in return.

By building relationships with influential bloggers first, Eugene Mota got an 80% engagement rate when he later did outreach to 21 influencers.

Research and pitch the right topics they need on their blog

This is one of the most important parts of your blogger outreach. Because no matter how much an influential blogger loves you, they won’t allow you to publish a poor post on their blog.

For instance, an influential blogger would probably not allow their 6-year old kid or their elderly mom write their posts for them just because they love them. So why would they allow you?

The best way to research for the right topics for an influential blog is to study the type of posts published on that blog. Even in an industry, you could still have many narrow niches. Some influential bloggers prefer to focus on a narrow niche in their industry.

One example is social media examiner which is in the digital marketing space but focused on social media. If you’re submitting a guest post here, then it must relate to social media.

Another example is The Write Practice which is based on writing but focused on how to help writers practice writing regularly. Check out what’s on their guest post guidelines page.

After doing this, you can come up with a list of about 3 topics that would be right for their blog.

Send an email

For most people doing blog outreach, this is usually their first step. But this strategy is usually doomed to failure.

Due to the large number of emails influential bloggers receive, they’ll usually discard your email if they don’t know you.

When you want to send your outreach email, you’ll have to exploit the connection you’ve built with this influential blogger over a period of time. You’ll find many email outreach templates online and this is one of them by Ankit Singla of Master Blogging:

But my advice is that you don’t use it. Think about it, many people are already using it and you want to stand out.

That’s not to say you should discard the email templates altogether. If you’re new at blogger outreach, these email templates can give you an idea of what to do. Whatever you do with your outreach email, there’s one word you should never forget:

Personalization!

Your email recipients should have no doubt that you’re writing that email to them and not just inserting some words into a template. To personalize your email, the first step is to use their name.

Nobody tires of hearing their name no matter how popular they are.

The next step is to use some details you’ve found about them in their blog posts.

This could be about an idea in one of their blog post that’s related to your proposed guest post. It could also be a personal habit or detail they divulged in one of their posts.

This helps to ensure that they continue reading your email. In your title, you can give your proposed title. This should be a title they’re likely to have on their blog.

For instance, Ryan Biddulph gave an example of an outreach email that would win him over:

This is because it’s personalized to him and the proposed title resembles what he would have on his blog. You should also show how your post will be beneficial to the blogger’s audience.

In that way, you’re proposing a piece of content that would further promote their reputation as a value provider.

Follow up if there’s no reply

It’s a reality that you might not get a reply to your outreach email straightaway. Even if you’ve carried out all the previous steps correctly. Influential bloggers are busy people.

They’re popular. And many people want to take their time just like you want to. They probably receive tens or hundreds of emails daily. There’s every chance your email might get missing.

Or they might see it and note it for later. It’s only human to forget things once in a while. When you get no reply to your email, say after 3 days, you can send a follow-up email to know the status of your request.

In most cases, you’ll get a reply in your follow-up. Below is an example of a follow-up email to an influencer for their thoughts about an issue:

If you get no reply after your first follow up, you might still follow up once or twice more depending on you.

If after these, you still get no reply, they may be uninterested in your idea. You have to accept that not every influential blogger will give you the reply you want.

Have a strategy to publicize your post

Do you have a plan to publicize the post you want to publish on an influential blog? Of course, the influencer will naturally publicize any post on their blog.

But you should add to this value by publicizing it too. Your work doesn’t end after you get your precious guest post published.

This could even be part of your pitch.

You should tell them how you plan to share the guest post on social media and reply to readers’ comments.

This is also a way to show commitment to an influential blogger especially if they engage well with their readers in the comments.

Conclusion

Getting featured on influential blogs can bring big benefits to your business. You can reach a new and bigger audience and gain more customers.

But it has to start with better blogger outreach. This outreach helps you to get your product out there in front of new people and also improve your reputation in your industry.

To ensure a better outreach, you have to do a lot of research and get to know an influencer before making your requests. Likewise, you should help to share the post after it’s published.

If you are interested in the process of ranking on top of search engines and want to learn more about SEO & content marketing read our Ultimate Guide to SEO for SaaS.

7 Tips for Better Blogger Outreach