Presuming that you’re not working for a multi-national that spends millions of marketing dollars or that you crawled out of your mother’s womb with a silver spoon, you would outreach to bloggers – like real men do; aka using the conventional methods of building relationships (vs. organizing a pitch via a super expensive PR agency or a blogger outreach tool).
Now that we know what we want i.e. the blogger’s attention, the question is to figure out the how. Or wait, the question is to figure out the who. Or wait, the question is to figure out the when. Well, the right answer is – All the above.
How to mess up your blogger outreach:
- Sending a mass email to a randomly bought email list
- Sending a mass email to an email list you created
- Sending a mass email to anyone, ever… EVER
- Telling the blogger that he/she looks hot in pictures
- Talking endlessly about your product (no matter how awesome you think it is)
- Long emails (studies show that long emails could potentially stop your heartbeat for 22 seconds)
How NOT to mess your blogger outreach:
- Understand your business – Once you understand your niche, you’d have a fair idea about who you’d like to write about you.
- The research – It might take days / weeks / months, but like they say – Patience is the key. Do a thorough research on the top 100 sites / blogs that write about things that matter to your end consumer. If you’re an antivirus solutions company, you’re doomed. Everyone uses an antivirus. Your outreach list would include tech bloggers, mommy bloggers, game bloggers, phone bloggers, porn bloggers, end of the world bloggers, you get the flow.
- How to make sense of it –
Step 1 – Now that you have a large chunk of data, let’s start making sense of it. It’d be awesomely helpful to categorize the data with the blog writers (their names, their email addresses, previous posts, other blogs they’ve written for – thanks to Google).
Step 2 – Don’t forget to add the country of origin of the blog/ blogger, monthly unique visitors (statsaholic.com) and how desperate you are to be published on the blog, amongst the categories. - Setting fire to the rain (the email) –
Step 1 – The email should have a friendly subject (vs. an annoying product pitch).
Step 2 – The email should address the blogger as a human (perhaps because he is one).
Step 3 – The email should tell the blogger that you’re interested in him – (AND YOU SHOULD BE, IF YOU NEED HIM TO DO A FAVOR FOR YOU).
Step 4 – To show him that you’re interested in him, talk about his previous posts, talk about whatever information you could gather about him in a sentence or two – and how you appreciate it.
Step 5 – As shortly as possible, introduce your product
Step 6 – Ask for an honest feedback
Step 7 – Ask for his feedback to be published - What’s next? Now that you’ve set fire, get ready for round 2. Round 2 is ensuring that you’re in the blogger’s good books. How do you do that? Well, quite simply – just keep in touch. Keep reading his articles and interacting wherever you genuinely feel like.
Conclusions:
- Love your bloggers (God said and I quote “Thou shalt love thy bloggers as thyself”)
- Use twitter (twitter = bloggers’ personal space). Invade their personal space. Stalk them – professionally
- Think about mutual benefits – No blogger would ever do something without getting something in return. Some bloggers like gifts, some like money, most would work with just a few words of praise.
I hope you don’t commit the mistakes I’ve committed when I started outreaching to bloggers. If there are any tips you’d like to share, please use the comment section below.
This is a guest post by Rehman Abdur .
My name is Abdur Rehman and I help businesses use Digital Marketing to Acquire New Customers, Build Stronger Relationships & Improve Profitability. My mission is to create the RIGHT targeted approach for businesses, that effectively maximizes the marketing dollars.
With 6+ years of experience at large and successful companies in a variety of roles, I truly understand how all facets of marketing combine to form a company’s strategy, from research to marketing communications, branding, sales force coaching, and new product development.
There are sooo many ways to mess up your blogger outreach and bloggers experience many of them in their inboxes daily 🙂
Good post, thanks for sharing – hopefully more people pitching follow these steps!
Hey Abdur, great post. Sounds like you’re speaking from experience 🙂 If I were a blogger, I’d be suspicious of just about anyone who wasn’t a known associate. I just came across this site yesterday (well, they reached out to us). We’re considering using it as a service and I’d be interested in your perspective. blogdash[dot]com. Would you accept a pitch done in the right way from someone on this platform?
Hey Michael,
Blogdash is quite popular as an outreach tool. Using it or not would depend upon your needs.
You’d use a tool like Blogdash for a product / service which appeals to a mass audience. If you’re looking at a specific niche (e.g. medical equipments), Blogdash wouldn’t work well.
Similarly, if you’re looking at an outreach that covers plenty of mediocre blogs (which can be good too), Blogdash would work.
If you’re looking at a high profile blog, I’d suggest getting your hands dirty and stalking the blogger yourself.
Hope this helps
Hi Rehman,
Great post, thats a fantastic framework for an outreach piece.
Personally, I have found taking a Psychological approach works. So looking at things like what particular words you use and how your reference things tends to have a major impact.
One of the major issues I have is how to open the email, do you have any tips?
Cheers,
John
Hey John,
I’m glad you liked the post. I’ve tried different “lines” to open an email – quite unsuccessfully.
The one that worked best for me was quite stalker-ish. Something like “Hey X, I’ve read articles written by you on a,b,c,d,e,f sites. I’m following you on Twitter, I’ve subscribed to your updates on Facebook, so on and so forth.
Now that I’ve creeped you out, my name is Rehman and I would like to know what you think about…”
Please let me know how this works for you.
[…] outreach. If you want to learn how blogger outreach should be done properly, then be sure to read Blogger Outreach – How NOT to mess it up […]
Hey Rehman,
Excellent article, every internet marketing professional should read it.
I would like to ask you. How you find the blogs usually? I mean you are using blogs directory or anything else?
Thanks anyways for the great piece of content.
[…] – Mediatiza iniţiativele organizaţiei prin blogger/influencer outreach. […]
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