Blogger Outreach: A Guide for Beginners (Free Templates)

Blogger outreach is a very efficient way of raising awareness of your brand and making a wider audience aware of your products and services.

In this post, we’re going to talk about what blogger outreach is and if it can still be beneficial and effective for your business.

Moreover, we’re going to discuss the different types of blogger outreach including:

• Link building
• Content promotion
• Collaboration and partnership

To mention a few.

Additionally, we’re going to take you through a four-step process that you can follow to do blogger outreach yourself using Respona.

Let’s get started by defining blogger outreach.

What is Blogger Outreach?

Blogger outreach is when a company partners up with a blogger or influencer in order to raise brand awareness through leveraging the blogger’s following.

The way blogger outreaching works is that the company approaches the blogger and asks them for a product review, a branded mention, or a backlink in return for samples of its products, free services, or prizes for the blogger’s giveaways.

Put another way, sometimes a brand might simply reach out to the blogger to ask them to write about or refer to the company’s products or services in return for prizes and free samples.

You now know what blogger outreach is, but you’re probably still wondering if it works.

Let’s get into it.

Is blogger outreach still effective?

In one sentence, blogger outreach is still very much effective when done right.

Before we get in detail about whether blogger outreach is effective or not, it’s important to mention that, according to Backlinko, only 8.5% of all outreach emails get a reply.

It may sound disappointing, but if you think about it there are so many bad outreach emails that are being sent out on a daily basis.

Here’s one I got a while ago and, naturally, it went straight to my spam folder:

No personalization, no mention of their previous blogging activities, and zero examples of their work.

Just a generic email that’s more than obviously been automatically adjusted to refer to our brand in the opening line.

Even though there’s obviously nothing wrong with using an outreach tool that’ll help you automate the whole outreach process, it needs to be clear that adding your personal touch to everything you send out is essential.

Low response rates don’t mean that blogger outreach is doomed to fail, it simply means that brands need to get serious about it and create killer outreach campaigns if they actually want to get results, which they most certainly do.

When we talk about the commitment and email content that’ll make the recipient want to get back to you, we’re basically talking about having a clear outreach strategy, doing your research about your prospects, and personalizing your email content.

Let’s now get into five different types of blogger outreach you could consider using for your brand depending on your needs.

What Are the Different Types of Blogger Outreach?

As we’ve already said, blogger outreach is the process of reaching out to bloggers and influencers in order to generate buzz around your brand and make more people aware of it.

Depending on the nature of your campaign – you might want to focus on things like distributing your content or creating collaborations and partnerships – there are different types of blogger outreach campaigns.

The five types of blogger outreach we’re going to talk about are…

• Link building
• Content promotion
• Partnerships and collaborations
• Product and services promotion
• Guest blogging

…and they’re based on the different reasons why someone might want to reach out to influential bloggers.

Let’s jump right into link building.

Type #1: Link building

The first and one of the most common reasons why companies and marketers are generally using blogger outreach is for link building.

The reason for this is quite simple.

Efficient link building comes with a lot of benefits includingincreasing a website’s domain authority (DA) as well as generating referral traffic as a side benefit.

In other words, getting backlinks to your resources or landing pages from authoritative sites can help you increase your website’s authority and rank higher on the search engine results pages (SERPs).

Using a link-building tool will allow you to keep track of your link-building campaigns and streamline your link-prospecting process.

Additionally, it can save you valuable time and money, given how time-consuming link building can generally be if you don’t know how to do it.

A little further down the road, we’re going to show you exactly how you can do it yourself using Respona.

For now, let’s move forward with the second type we have for you.

Type #2: Content promotion

Another reason why you might want to use the power of blogger outreach is for content promotion purposes.

In other words, you might find yourself looking for the best bloggers or top influencers in your niche who’ll help you promote your content through channels relevant to your business.

Working with bloggers in order to promote your content increases the chances of your content actually getting noticed by your target audience.

The way this works is quite simple.

A blogger in a particular niche is usually someone with a loyal following that keeps up with the content they produce as well as the content they might recommend on their social media, podcasts, or any other channel they might be using.

Overall, reaching out to bloggers in your industry can help you:

• Promote your content, thus boosting your content marketing efforts
• Boost the efficiency of your content distribution process
• Make sure that your content will reach wider audiences

Let’s get to the next type.

Type #3: Collaboration or partnership

Focusing your moves towards creating collaborations and partnerships with professionals within your niche is one of the most popular reasons why experts do blogger outreach.

While you’re reaching out to relevant bloggers and influencers or new bloggers that produce fresh, trending content you’re basically building relationships within your industry.

Doing so might help you expand your reach, increase your social shares, boost the popularity of your social networks, and so on and so forth.

Put another way, blogger outreach can also be very efficient in terms of your digital PR which is firmly linked to your digital marketing strategies.

Plus, a lot of times it can be as easy as connecting with someone on LinkedIn or sending a killer follow-up email.

Why do I really need to build relationships, partnerships, and collaborations if I’m already producing great content, creating eye-catching infographics, or have a high-quality service in place – we hear you ask?

Because no matter how great your business is, you’ll always need people to actively support it and spread the word about it.

As simple as that!

Keep reading to find out yet another reason why you might need to consider reaching out to influential bloggers.

Type #4: Product or service promotion

Similar to reaching out to bloggers in order to help you promote your latest piece of content, you might also want to consider this type of outreach for product or service promotion.

On that note, having a blogger outreach strategy for product or service promotion purposes might mean that you’ll get bloggers from authority sites creating content about your brands, like case studies or product reviews.

This can bring a number of benefits such as:

• Increasing your organic traffic
• Getting you quality backlinks
• Raising awareness about your small business
• Increasing your follower count, thus increasing how many people learn more about your product
• Boosting your social media profiles
• Ultimately, generating interest for your product or service and possibly some sales as well

In terms of generating sales with influencer marketing – which is firmly linked to blogger outreach – we probably need to say that 49% of users on Twitter have stated that they generally rely on recommendations from influencers in relation to their purchasing decisions and preferences for brands.

Therefore, we understand that crafting your marketing campaigns around an efficient blogger outreach process can actually be truly beneficial for your brand.

Below is the fifth reason why one might start emailing bloggers in their niche now.

Type #5: Guest blogging

Guest blogging, or guest posting, is one of the most common reasons why companies reach out to bloggers and influencers in their industry.

Guest blogging is basically a content marketing and SEO activity that allows someone who owns or works at a company to promote their business, content, and products through guest posts that they publish on other blogs.

These are some of the benefits guest blogging comes with – which can also be considered benefits of blogger outreach itself:

• Improve domain authority and build a strong backlink profile
• Reach new audiences
• Acquire referral traffic
• Connect with influencers and bloggers

To get there, you need to reach out to the blog owner or editor and ask them whether they accept guest blogs.

Author’s Note: A little further down in this post, we’ll be sharing a template you can use when reaching out to other bloggers for guest blogging purposes.

We’re now done talking about the different types of blogger outreach.

Moving on.

Step-by-step Process for Effective Blogger Outreach

We’ll now take you through a step-by-step process for actually finding the right bloggers in your industry and reaching out to them with a thoughtful cold outreach campaign and a personalized email.

We’ll naturally do that by using our very own blogger outreach tool, Respona.

To better illustrate the process of finding the right bloggers in your niche, we’re going to use a hypothetical scenario that might also show you just how broad the range of options are when it comes to the reasons why someone might need to reach out to bloggers.

Our hypothetical scenario

For the sake of example, we’ll say that we’re an eCommerce store that sells camping and outdoor activities equipment.

The reason for reaching out to bloggers is that we want to get links to our product pages.

More specifically, we’re mostly looking for list posts from bloggers in our niche that mention camping tents from some of our biggest competitors and other eCommerce brands, but that don’t yet mention our products.

Given that directly promoting our new products and product pages might make us sound spammy or unreliable, we’ll be focusing on promoting our content pages instead, thus passing link equity to our product pages too – which are generally our main focus.

Let’s now jump straight into finding those bloggers for our blogger outreach campaign.

Step #1: Find the Right Bloggers

The first step is to generally find the right bloggers for our outreach campaign.

To do so we need to start a new campaign with Respona…

… give it a descriptive and memorable name…

… and simply click on the Continue button, which we’ve highlighted for you in the screenshot above.

If you’ve ever used Respona or have been reading our blog, you’ll know that the tool comes with a built-in search engine which you can use to do your search queries, exactly as you’d do in your Google Chrome or other browsers you might be using.

To perform your search, you need to select a source for your search and add the keyword or topic you’re interested in knowing more about.

Since we’re interested in blog posts that might talk about our competitors but not our products, we’re going for the Blogs source:

Additionally, we’re adding our keyword which, in this case, is as straightforward as it gets.

As we’ve already covered, we’re interested in finding list posts that talk about camping tents – which is one of our top products.

For that reason, we’re simply adding the keyword top camping tents and also activating the SEO metrics to make sure that we’ll get results from authoritative sites.

We’re now going through the results our search returned and we’re choosing the ones that are most relevant and are worth reaching out to.

As you can see, in this case, we’ve chosen ten opportunities which we’re going to use in the next steps of the process.

Let’s start crafting our outreach email now.

Step #2: Craft Your Email Pitch

The second big step we need to take is to craft our email pitch, which will get us one step closer to efficiently reaching out to the bloggers Respona will find for us.

Even though Respona offers a truly wide range of email templates that you can personalize in no time and use for your outreach campaigns, the tool also gives users the opportunity to add their own personal templates, depending on the nature of each campaign.

For this particular blogger outreach campaign, we’re going to work with a personal template, starting from the Create New button.

When creating a new template within the tool, you’re basically creating an email sequence from scratch.

This basically means that you can add your initial email and any follow-up emails, depending on your outreach needs.

We’re going to click on the Create New Step button…

… which will allow us to add the content of our personal email template.

Before you click on the blue Save button to save the content of your email pitch, it’s recommended that you check the grade Respona automatically gave your content.

The tool takes into account several factors such as:

• The email subject length
• The email word count
• Whether there’s a question inside the email body
• Whether there’s a spam word inside the email body

Make sure to make any adjustments to your content to have a higher chance of getting a reply.

Once that’s done, review your email sequence and get ready for the next exciting step of the process.

Step #3: Find the Right Contact Information

After having crafted your email pitch, you get straight into finding the right contact information for the bloggers you’re going to reach out to.

When it comes to finding the right contact information for your prospects through Respona, it all starts with your automation setup.

This might sound complicated but, honestly, automation setup is just a fancy term to say that we’re going to tell Respona more about the prospects we need contact information for.

More specifically, we tell Respona to:

• Only assign opportunities to authors of URLs only if the author actually works for the company associated with the URL, which means that they will have the authority to perform changes to the content and give us a brand mention  
• Assign opportunities to other people who work for the company associated with the URL if there’s no author assigned
• Assign a catch-all email if no valid email address is found for our contact person
• Assign a company generic email if no person with our defined criteria is found

Additionally, we’re adding some position and priority tags for the people assigned to opportunities; this’ll allow us to get contact information from people that are somehow related to content creation within the company and have editorial access to the blog.

As soon as we’re done setting up the automation, we get to review it…

… and let it run.

As you can see, in this case, Respona has been able to assign 10 out of 10 – that’s 100% of the people! – opportunities and got us ten credits to do so.

Clicking on the blue Continue button at the bottom-right corner of the screen will get us the contact information for each one of our opportunities.

Given that Respona has been able to assign a contact person to all of our ten opportunities, the page that we’ll see when clicking on each one of our prospects will look something like this…

Hypothetically speaking, in case there were any unassigned opportunities, we could either add a contact manually…  

… or perform a domain-level contacts search.

In the first case, you’d need to add any contact information we might have or have found online about the prospects you’re interested in reaching out to.

In terms of the domain-level contacts, you’d need to add the prospect’s name and domain associated with it to get their email address and assign an opportunity to it.

With all our ten opportunities assigned to a contact person, we can get to the next step, which is to personalize our email pitch and launch our campaign.

Step #4: Personalize Your Email and Launch Your Campaign

Last but not least, personalizing your email pitch and launching your campaign are the two tiny and easy steps you need to take to complete your blogger outreach journey.

If you’re into email outreach, you probably already know just how important it is to send out unique and personalized emails to your prospects.

Doing so can significantly help you in terms of getting a reply since personalized emails definitely sound less spammy than generic emails.

When it comes to email personalization, things are as easy as ABC; all you need to do is to go through your outreach opportunities and adjust any variables included in your email, such as any adjustable fields in the subject line or the body of your email.

Author’s Note: Some of the variables will be adjusted automatically by Respona.

For example, you might want to add your prospect’s first name and something specific about their job position or the country they live in.

Since we’re now going to reach out to bloggers, a safe and efficient thing to do is to mention pieces of content they’ve written or refer to specific blog posts.  

On that note, you might also want to pick article excerpts and add them to the email body.

You need to keep on doing this until you personalize all your outreach opportunities.

Once all your ten opportunities move from the not personalized to the personalized column, you can launch your blogger outreach campaign by clicking on the Launch Campaign button on the top right corner of the page.

Feels great, doesn’t it?

“Steal” Our Blogger Outreach Template

Are you one of those talented people that can craft a killer outreach email in no time?

Or do you always find yourself struggling to create a good email?

No matter the case, we think having access to some efficient outreach email templates can make the whole email outreach process an easy one for you.

You can either save these templates in your Gmail, personalize, and use them every time depending on the occasion, or – in case you’re using Respona – you can access and use them every time you launch a new campaign, exactly as we saw a little further up.

Let’s go straight into the first blogger outreach template that will work just fine for link-building purposes.

Simply make sure to personalize the templates before sending them out in order to create thoughtful content that’ll resonate with your prospects.

Author’s Note: In the five templates we’re going to share with you in this post, the {braces}, which are called variables, represent custom fields that’ll be adjusted automatically by Respona. The [brackets] represent fields that you’ll need to adjust yourself manually when editing your email sequence.

Here we go.

Type #1: Link building

For all link builders out there, here’s a great blogger outreach email template you can personalize and use to make the most of your link-building efforts.

Some love for {organization}’s (topic) article

Hey {first name},

Happy {day of week}!

Just finished reading through your post, {url title}.

It was such a good read, I had to share some thoughts.

Firstly, it really stuck with me when you pointed out that [article summary snippet].

Secondly, you covered, “[anchor/targeted keyword]” in the article, but didn’t go into further detail or link to another resource.

We just released a guide that will provide a little something extra for your readers who want to learn more about [anchor/targeted keyword].

Want to take a look? I got you: [article url]

As a huge “thank you”, I’d be happy to provide [incentive – (social share, indirect link, free trial, etc)].

Regardless, I’ll definitely be a frequent reader. Keep it up with the stellar content :)

Thanks,

[Name]

An email template like this one includes just the right amount of content in order to demonstrate that you’ve done your research and that you really care about the value and quality of the prospect’s content.

Using this template, we have received many responses similar to this:

Let’s get to the next one.

Type #2: Content promotion

First things first, we need to say that promoting your content doesn’t start with an outreach email.

It starts with killer content that’ll give any prospect a reason to get back to you and eventually promote your content.

If know for sure that you’ve got amazing content, you can then start personalizing the email template that follows:

Suggestion for your (topic) post

Hey {first name},

Hope you’re having a great, productive week!

It’s [name] here from [company].

I just finished reading your post on [topic]. Loved the way you talked about [insert article summary].

I noticed, however, that your post doesn’t present a step-by-step process on how to [topic].

It seems like it’s your lucky day; we happen to have a detailed [type of resource] on [topic]!

You can have a look:

[link to your resource]

Let me know what you think!

Thanks,

[Name]

This email template is a simple, friendly one that shows the recipient that you’ve got some amazing content going on.

Without exaggeration, you’re basically giving the prospect an opportunity to enhance their content by promoting your resource or resources.

If your content is relevant and thought through, they won’t say no to it.

Keep reading to find one more blogger outreach template.

Type #3: Collaboration or partnership

As we saw a little further up in this post, doing outreach for collaboration and partnership purposes is quite a smart and important thing to do from which you can get lots of value for your business.

An email template you could use when you decide that a partnership or collaboration with a blogger or influencer in your niche should be your next step, is:

Blog post ideas for {organization}

Hey {first name},

How’s everything going in [city]?

My name is [your name].

I’ve been blogging for over [years] years and have a website that gets over [visits] monthly visits.

I heard about {organization} from [conference or event], checked your Instagram and Facebook, and really like what you guys do.

Additionally, I’m helping brands like [A], [B], and [C] sell more products online.

Would you be interested in discussing a collaboration between us?

Let me know if I can send over additional details :)

Waiting to hear back from you!

Thank you,

[Name]

We totally think an email template like the one you’ve just read can be quite effective.

Why?

Because it’s personalized and makes sure to mention some very important points about your work.

Doing that helps show the prospect that a potential collaboration between the two of you could be beneficial for both parties.

No one can resist collaboration when they can see potential in it.  

Moving forward with our blogger outreach email templates.

Type #4: Product or service promotion

Similar to what we said when we talked about content promotion, having a great product or service to promote should be your top priority.

Once that’s done, you can start focusing your efforts on promoting whatever your brand is making.

When reaching out to prospects to promote your products and services, you can use an email template like this one:

Something new for {company}

Hey {first name},

Happy {day of week}!

Was looking to connect with fellow marketers to start the quarter, so I thought I’d reach out.

Just launched [your product/service + short description] and wanted to run it by you.

Think [competitors] but with [unique differentiating feature]. We just brought on [1 or 2 notable companies] recently. Would love for you to take a look and get your thoughts, too!

Can I send through some more info?

Cheers,

[Name]

This email template does nothing more than give your prospect a bit of context around your product.

It’s no doubt very efficient in doing so.

By referring to your competitors and the features that differentiate you from them, you’re basically managing to place your product in your prospects’ minds and giving them a clear idea of what your company is all about.

That’s the main goal of any outreach move, isn’t it?

Below is the final template we have for you.

Type #5: Guest blogging

As promised, there’s also a guest blogging email template we’ve prepared and want to share with you.

This one, like all templates we’ve shared with you so far, needs to be customized.

When that’s done, you can use it when you’re reaching out to bloggers for guest posting purposes.

Question about guest post submission

Hey {first name},

My name is [your name] and I am a [Role] at [Company Name] — {Something about the company}.

This may be a bit out of the blue, but we decided to reach out because we’re actively searching for guest posting opportunities.

We’ve been following your blog for a while now, and we think that we could add some value to {organization}’s audience through a nice and well-written guest post.

Everything that we write is SEO-optimized and well-researched.

These are some content pieces we’ve published on websites like {website 1}, {website 2} and {website 3}:

{Title & URL 1}

{Title & URL 2}

{Title & URL 3}

Would you like to hear a couple of topics we have in mind for you guys?

Thanks,

[Name]

Exactly as the subject line suggests, this email template is basically asking a question about whether the prospect or the prospect’s company accepts guest post submissions.

It naturally includes several examples of the sender’s work as these are necessary for showing the prospect what kind of topics you usually cover and whether these are in the niche they’re interested in.

Our advice would be that you should try to reach out to prospects that are in your niche.

This, alongside sharing quality blogs, will maximize your chances of getting a reply.

Let’s wrap this post up and close with some final thoughts.

Now Over to You

There you have it.  

Our blogger outreach guide is now completed.

In this post, we’ve discussed a definition of a blogger outreach program and also showed you several blogger outreach examples.

Additionally, we’ve taken you through a simple four-step process for finding the right bloggers in your niche and reaching out to them with a thoughtful and well-organized campaign.

We hope that the outreach email templates we’ve given away will make your outreach efforts as easy as possible.

If you want to streamline the outreach process even further, feel free to request a demo with Respona and keep track of your outreach campaigns.

Good luck with your blogger outreach!

The post Blogger Outreach: Guide for Beginners (Free Templates Included) appeared first on Respona.

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By: Vlad Orlov
Title: Blogger Outreach: Guide for Beginners (Free Templates Included)
Sourced From: respona.com/blog/blogger-outreach
Published Date: Fri, 16 Jul 2021 11:10:16 +0000

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