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:

  1. Sending a mass email to a randomly bought email list
  2. Sending a mass email to an email list you created
  3. Sending a mass email to anyone, ever… EVER
  4. Telling the blogger that he/she looks hot in pictures
  5. Talking endlessly about your product (no matter how awesome you think it is)
  6. Long emails (studies show that long emails could potentially stop your heartbeat for 22 seconds)

blogger outreach epic fail not

How NOT to mess your blogger outreach:

  1. Understand your business – Once you understand your niche, you’d have a fair idea about who you’d like to write about you.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. 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
  5. 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.

rehman abdur

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.