The Art of Outreach: How to Build Relationships with Fellow Bloggers
Blogging is a social activity. You’re not sharing your ideas or thoughts to a wall. The sheer act of publishing your post online opens you to opportunities of interacting with your readers and like-minded people. You can then build your relationships with them into something fruitful on a business scale.
That said, outreach skills are lost among bloggers. They are more concerned with launching SEO campaigns, which is not bad in principle. But devoting most of their time to this strategy prevents them from making a connection with their audience and influencers within their industry. Cultivating relationships can lead to more rewarding opportunities in the future.
If you’re not sure where to start with your blogger outreach campaign, below is a step-by-step process on how you can do it.
Find bloggers within your niche
This can be done efficiently using Buzzstream and Inkybee. Both online tools will help you find influential bloggers within your niche that you can reach out to. List down the bloggers you found from both tools in a spreadsheet.
If you want a cost-free approach, you can always use the Google Blog Search to find popular bloggers to perform your outreach on. Also, use the BuzzSumo Influencer feature to find important bloggers from Twitter.
You will see factors to consider whether to include the blogger in your list such as Retweet Ratio, Reply Ratio, and Average Tweets.
You can learn more about the blogger by clicking on the View Links Shared to see the domains that have been shared the most on their Twitter. The domain that has been shared the most is likely the blog that they own.
Comment on their blogs
Find posts that you can relate to and share your thoughts in the comments section. Keep in mind that your comments will have to be approved by the blog owner before it gets published. Therefore, to ensure that your comment gets approved, make sure that it observes three things, which I also mentioned in this post:
- Insightful – Pam shared her own thoughts based on her experience about the topic and supports her opinions and arguments using reliable resources.
- Includes link – If you have a page on your site that contributes something valuable to the discussion, use it as a resource to your comment.
- Ends with a question – Asking a question at the end of your comment increases your chances of getting replied to by site owners and continue your engagement with them.
Promote their posts
Sharing the post where you placed your comment (whether approved or not) to your audience in social media will help drive more traffic to their blog, something that they will appreciate.
Send email and make connections
Reach out to the blogger from their Contact page or email address. Let them know that you have been following their blog and have been impressed with the posts they’ve been publishing. Inform them that you have commented on their posts and have even shared the post on your social media. Mentioning these things can help your email stand out from the rest they have been receiving all this time.
From here, you need an actionable item that the blogger needs to act upon to consummate the relationship you’re trying to form. Below are a few suggestions.
Broken link building
This link building technique lets you find broken links within the page where you want to acquire the link. Once listing down the broken links, you then mention your own link to be included on the page. There’s a good chance that site owners will include your link because you did them a favor by pointing out link that he needs to update an take out. Here’s the entire process at work.
Using this technique as part of your blogger outreach, you don’t have to include a link to your page. You can simply offer your help without asking anything in return, which is a great way to build a relationship online with webmasters.
Conduct an interview
Ask them if they are interested to be interviewed via email. If so, send out insightful and personalized questions to bloggers and publish their answers on your blog.
The interview works both ways. Aside from providing them a link to their blog through yours, you get to learn how their minds work and take the best practices they shared in the interview on your own blog. Either way, you have deepened the relationship with the blogger by conducting an interview.
Write a post for their blog
Before you send out this offer, make sure that the blog accepts guest posts – if not, kindly skip this suggestion. Also, you need to make sure that your intention in posting on their blog is to provide insightful information within their niche, nothing more. While guest blogging is an effective online business idea to help generate money for your blog, it is frowned upon as a link building practice, so it’s best that you don’t go this route as well.
When the blogger approves your offer, link back to posts he published in his blog on your article to build more goodwill. You can learn the best guest blogging practices by reading this post.
Collaborate
Once you have repeatedly done any of the steps above, it’s now time to make sure your relationship is able to create something sustainable that will benefit both of you.
The product will depend on the quality of relationship you’ve cultivated with the blogger. For example, I have written enough guest posts for NicheHacks.com that I have become part of their team. I am compensated for the high-quality content I provide for the site. It’s a win-win situation!
The challenge now is finding what kind of collaboration you wish to form with the blogger.
Final thoughts: Blogger outreach is one of the most powerful ways to leverage your communication and web marketing skills into a sustainable and advantageous output. Following the tips above should provide you ideas on how you should approach outreach within your industry.
More on blogger outreach:
5 Essential Collaboration Tools Bloggers Can Use to Grow Their Community
How Bloggers Can Better Organize Activities & Targets by Using a Dashboard Tool
