Blogger Outreach: A Guide to Guest Posting

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Blogger Outreach Guide

Guest blogging offers a great means of building up your SEO with quality links and offers both parties a win-win situation. The blogger gets great content that can be monetised and you get those all important links for your post panda SEO campaign. What’s more, by building long-term lasting relationships through a good blogger outreach plan, you can even generate further link building opportunities in the future.

While blogger outreach is a great source of links, scouring the web for opportunities can be quite the daunting task if you don’t have a good plan to back it up. So here in this blog post, I’ve laid out my guide to putting your blogger outreach plan into action. Blogger outreach is hard work, it will take countless hours and you’ll send a mind-numbing amount of emails in the process but keep in mind the ideas below, and you’ll get those positive responses in your inbox in no time!

• Prospecting relevant blogs

No-one understands your target audience as well as you do (if this isn’t the case, you have bigger worries than blogger outreach techniques) and you should be able to create useful content fairly easily.

The prospective websites you are looking for are relevant bloggers who have a history of accepting guest posts previously. Quality and relevance are what we’re looking for here. after all, if you’re going to spend the time to create some killer content, you want some decent link juice for it right?

Short-list a small number of relevant blogs who have previously accepted guest posts, about twenty should work, and spend the time personalising each and every email you send them. Personalised engagement and communication is the silver bullet to a high response and adoption rate.

• Engaging the blogger
  

Most bloggers have their name and email address loud and clear on their blog. For those more, anonymous bloggers, make sure to first check their social media accounts (especially Twitter and Facebook) for their names and emails. You’d be surprised by the number of times I found the info I needed in their Twitter bio or Facebook info section, rather than on their blog.  Marcus Taylor at SEOptimise, identified that some bloggers will openly state on their blogs how they like to be contacted, and may push you towards their preferred channel of communication.

The search for a blogger’s name and/or email should only last about a minute but it’s a minute that’s well worth taking. No-one likes an impersonal email, and in the age of social media accounts, WHOis and other quick identifiers, you should be able to find a name for a good portion of your shortlist.

Another thing to keep in mind is the trusted ego boost. As an SEO, the art of schmoozing should be front and centre in  your messages, and when you think about it, which of these messages would you respond to?

1. “Dear Webmaster, I love your SEO blog.”
2. “Hello Andrew, I’ve been reading one of your awesome blog posts on Google punishing the SEO of AdSense users and I loved it!”

If you didn’t choose the second option, I’d seriously recommend a trip to the doctors as you may have a severe mental illness that’s going to need medical attention.

• Keep in touch

Once you have managed to knock out a quality guest post on a shortlisted blog, try and keep up the relationship with the owner so as to make the job easier next time. After all, who knows when you might have another opportunity to create content that would be perfect for the targeted blog.

• Dealing with rejection

A great tip from a previous Distilled blogpost, outlined that receiving an objection to your proposal is not the end of the conversation. It is just the beginning. They have just offered you the perfect excuse to contact the blogger again but this time addressing their issues with your idea gives you something solid and personal to base the conversation on.

At the end of the day, your blogger outreach plan needs to keep in mind that you’re dealing with people here, and unlike 90% of others on the web, these guys are getting crappy link building emails hundreds of times a day. Don’t be just another spam email. Be yourself and stand out from the pack by being honest and succinct in your emails. Effective blogger outreach isn’t always easy, but realising that there is more to securing a guest post than spraying and praying is the first step in building effective outreach campaigns.

For further tips on constructing an outreach email, have a look at Hubspots’s great “How to Use Guest Blogging for Effective Link Building” post.

Tell me all about your own blogger outreach successes and failures below or drop me a message via my Twitter at @andrew_isidoro!