How to Improve Your Authority Blog Outreach Strategy

So, you researched the best blogger outreach tactics online and implemented their teachings in your campaign.

But why aren’t your prospects replying to you?

Does that mean that all you’ve learned about blogger outreach is wrong?

Not necessarily.

As a tactic, blogger outreach is a great way to build relationships with bloggers and influencers.

The problem starts in how you approach your outreach process.

There are many variables to consider in your outreach that you could get wrong, which messes up the entire campaign altogether.

This post talks about how you can refine your blogger outreach campaign to get more influencers to reply to your emails and get them to perform your desired action.

Changing Your Mindset

Blogger outreach serves different purposes, depending on what you wish to achieve with it.

Some use this tactic when reaching out to journalists and publishers to cover their stories. Others rely on blogger outreach to generate backlinks to their site pages.

While blogger outreach can help you achieve these goals, the biggest concern here is how you approach influencers with your offer.

In other words, you are more concerned with getting other people to do what YOU want.

For instance, it’s common nowadays for people to reach out to publishers, asking them to link back to their posts, like this one:

However, this email template fails to answer this simple question for recipients:

“Why should I do it?”

“Your audience will love this post” is not a legitimate reason. In most cases, there’s probably a much better resource they could find online and link to instead of the post in the email.

Also, getting them to edit the post, include a link to your post, and update the post takes time to complete. Meanwhile, you just wait on your throne, all high and mighty, waiting for them to do your bidding.

It’s simply not a fair exchange.

So, if you ask them to do something for you without giving something of equal value in return, your outreach strategy will fail from the start.

Therefore, you need to shift your mindset from:

“Which publications should I contact to spread the word about my business?”

To:

“How can I provide value to publications in exchange for getting a backlink to my site?”

For people seeking out link opportunities, below are two ideas to help you create value in your blogger outreach:

1. Write a guest post free of charge. Pitch topics relevant to the site that it hasn’t covered before. You can even include a link or two to your site in the article for good measure!
2. Link out to one of their posts on a guest post you’re writing for a different site that is of equal authority to theirs.

Incorporating either idea in your outreach campaign allows you to provide something of equal value to your request. This allows publications to consider your offer at least, if not accept it outright.

Prospecting

Another critical factor in blogger outreach is finding the best prospects for your blogger outreach initiative.

But there are two phases to worry about in the prospecting stage:

1. Finding high-authority, high-traffic websites
2. Find the right person to reach out to for your pitch.

Regarding the first phase, you must use an SEO tool that helps you compute metrics that determine a website’s authority and traffic.

One of the best tools to use is Ahrefs with its Keyword Research feature.

Type the niche adjacent to your site as the keyword in the search bar. You can’t type your exact niche here because you’ll produce your direct competitors, who will be more unlikely to link to you.

For example, if you have a dog bed website, you want to find sites in a different but related niche like dog food, dog healthcare, and others. 

On the next page, click on Traffic shares > By domain on the left sidebar to see websites ranking on top of Google search for the niche’s related keywords.

From here, you’ll have a shortlist of prospects that you should consider reaching out to.

But before doing that, manually check the domains first and see if it’s possible to get a guest post published on the site.

The best indicator here is if the site has a blog section. That means there’s a chance you can get an article up on the website.

To dig deeper with your prospects, click on them to see more metrics using Ahrefs’ Site Explorer.

You should see here the site’s Domain Rating (DR), which computes the site’s link profile. The higher the DR, the more authoritative the site.

It also shows you the organic traffic the site is receiving. You want to get backlinks from websites that rank on organic search for high-volume keywords.

Also, the fact that the site is generating traffic from search engines means that it’s doing something right in the eyes of Google. So, you want to piggyback on its success by getting a link from the site ASAP.

Once you have the sites, you plan on reaching out to, you move on to the second phase, which is finding who to reach out to with your pitch.

Sometimes, you may skip this part, as some sites have a Write for Us page. Just fill out its form from a site like GetResponse and wait for them to respond.

At the same time, you should be wary of sites with this page.

While they may have established processes and editorial guidelines for accepting guest posts, these sites have been penalized by Google in one of its recent algorithm updates.

Again, not all these sites are bad. But sites like these are few and far between. Most of them with Write for Us pages neither have the clout nor authority to justify writing for them.

To verify if the site is worth writing guest posts for, check the quality of its published last ten blog posts.

If the content is high-quality and offers value to its readers, you should consider reaching out to this site.

For those without a “Write for Us” page, you should check the organization’s employees and emails.

You can do this using your favorite link prospecting tool. Upload the prospect URLs, and the tool will produce a list of people working for the company and their potential emails.

Target content, marketing, or SEO managers in the organization. They have the best understanding of your link building pitch more than anyone in the organization.

So, whenever you send them your email, they will have a higher chance of replying to you.

Also, there’s a possibility that the email isn’t correct since the tool can only provide the most likely email address each of them uses in the company.

Nonetheless, you’re better off taking your chances with the emails you see here.

Outreach

Once you’ve settled on a mindset and determined your prospects, now’s the time to perform the outreach.

A lot has been said about developing your drip email sequence and how to write each one to increase open and response rates.

In this case, let’s skip to choosing between the automated and manual processes.

Ideally, you want to use an outreach software to send the emails in bulk to your prospects.

You can also set up follow-up emails if they didn’t reply to your initial email to ensure they receive your message.

This automated process is the easiest way to reach out to prospects for backlinks. All you have to worry about once you launch the campaign is to measure the results and tweak the campaign as necessary.

However, the automated method is best used if you reach out to hundreds and thousands of prospects in your campaign.

If you only have a handful of prospects for your blogger outreach, consider reaching out to prospects manually.

This way, you can cut down on unnecessary costs and focus all your energy on sending personalized emails to prospects.

Content Creation

After getting your prospects to agree with your pitch, writing the content is in order.

The type of content you will write for the website depends on its editorial guidelines. Most established websites follow guidelines in their content to ensure quality in every published piece.

So, expect prospects to send you the guidelines to follow in your content.

Also, expect the guidelines to demand that you write long-form articles (at least 1,500 words) with clear formatting (use subheadings and images) and optimized for your target keyword.

Another factor to consider in their guidelines is the links in the article. Most of them require only several outbound links, so be sure to stick within the allowed volume.

There’s also the nofollow link attribute rule you should be wary of.

If the site doesn’t allow dofollow links in the article, that means the link won’t pass link equity to your site and won’t help your site as much to rank on Google.

Note: This is when you can ask other prospects for a link placement in your guest post in exchange for getting a link on their site, as mentioned earlier.

Now, if you don’t fancy yourself as a writer, you must hire someone comfortable with writing the proposed topic.

Using Ahrefs again, use its Content Explorer to enter your guest post topic. The e=next page will show you the results of authors who have gotten articles published about the topic.

From here, you can reach out to them on LinkedIn and ask for their help in writing the content.

Their knowledge and the number of articles written about the topic make them qualified to produce content that your prospects will approve of.

Getting the Placement

After producing the content, send it over to your contact person for review.

At this point, we’re probably looking at the most difficult part of blogger outreach:

The waiting game.

Remember that you reached out to authority websites with an established content strategy and publishing schedule.

So, just because you submitted your article on time doesn’t mean they’ll publish it immediately.

Depending on their schedule, you can expect them to put it up weeks—if not months—after they can review the content properly, which has a different schedule altogether!

This is where keeping track of your outreach emails comes in handy.

Using your outreach tool allows you to monitor the email threads with prospects and remind you to email them if they haven’t replied to you. Tools and software are great for detecting threats, such as the DMARC report that helps you avoid the spam box.

Or you can use Google Sheets to create a sheet containing information about the prospects, scheduled date of publication, the status of the article, and other variables.

These should help you stay on top of your blogger outreach campaign, especially if your prospects have forgotten your post.

Amplifying Results

After the post is published and your link is up on your prospect’s site, the real job has just begun.

At this point, you want to track the new backlink pointing to your site.

Granted that this is probably one of the most valuable backlinks you have in your link profile, you want to ensure it stays up on the domain.

Using a backlink monitoring tool lets you check the link’s status over time.

There are instances when the site owner updates the article and mistakenly removes your link from the content.

Your link monitoring tool will alert you that your backlink is down. From here, you must reach out to your point person and ask if they can put up the link to your site from the same page again.

Keep doing this on all your backlinks from high-authority, high-traffic sites to ensure that your site’s search rankings stay up.

As for your site pages that have links on these sites, make sure to take care of them as well.

Unless they’re ranking on any of the first three positions of search engine results pages (SERPs), it’s best to regularly update them with new accurate information to keep them fresh.

Also, use tools like Surfer SEO to re-optimize your content for keywords that each page is appearing on SERPs. Its Grow Flow allows you to target terms for which you didn’t know your content was ranking.

Finally, don’t forget to include internal links on pages with backlinks that rank at the top of Google search. Linking to other related pages on your site helps spread the link equity to those 

pages, helping them rank higher.

To make internal linking much easier, use Link Whisper or similar plugins to help you find and link topically relevant pages from your top-ranking pages with a few clicks of a button.

All these things may be too much for you to handle. That’s why you need help from freelancers to help ensure that your site’s SEO is in tip-top shape.

From observing your on-page SEO down to launching link building campaigns like blogger outreach, hiring qualified people from sites like Onlinejobs.ph enables you to focus on the big picture while letting freelancers worry about the little things.

Conclusion

The blogger outreach process is simple, but the little details separate a campaign whose emails don’t even get open to one that generates backlinks from authoritative websites.

This post pinpoints these details and what you can do to improve each of them.

After shifting your mindset to “how can you provide value to their site,” you can deliver better outreach emails to secure guest post opportunities with your prospects. 

From here, keep track of the content you’ll submit to them to ensure that they publish the articles on their websites at the soonest.

Of course, it’s one thing to implement these details in your campaign. But to see actual results over time, you need to be patient. 

It’s okay if your initial campaign didn’t do well, you just have to learn from your errors and try again with a new and improved campaign. Only by refining your campaign will you be able to see results and acquire backlinks that will improve your site’s SEO performance.