Much has been said about blogger outreach.

In fact, there’s too much to be said about the topic that it’s difficult to discern which information you read online is accurate or not.

Truly, blogger outreach is one of the fastest and best ways to generate backlinks for your site. Below is the general process on how you acquire links through blogger outreach:

1. Create great content
2. Find influencers who will most likely share your content to their audience, if not link to their site
3. Write a personalized email to an influencer
4. Influencer replies and links back to your site

In principle, blogger outreach is simple and straightforward enough for all online businesses to do if they are truly serious about beating the competition and ranking on top of Google organic search.

However, there are still marketers and business owners who make this singular, fundamental mistake when implementing a blogger outreach strategy.

What’s the biggest mistake that you can commit with blogger outreach?

The problem that most blogger outreach strategies have in common is two-fold.

The first is the use of email templates

Usually, people would want to take the easiest and least resistant path towards success in all of their undertakings. After all, why waste hours of your time doing something that can be done in minutes?

For blogger outreach, some rely on templates that they swipe from different tools and resources that claim to increase your conversion rate.

Instead of developing an email message from the ground up for your outreach, you settled with a template instead. Just copy and paste the template your outreach tool and click send. It’s that simple.

While it may be the most efficient way to pull off a blogger outreach strategy, it most certainly is not the best way to do it.

The biggest problem with templates is that they aim to provide a set message that will be sent to all. As if assuming that every person that you will reach out is the same.

However, this is never the case at all. The only similarity that influencers you plan to reach out to have with each other is that they have a foothold in your industry.

It shouldn’t be a surprise that you won’t get lots of responses from people by sending them an email based on a generic template.  You need to appear more personal with your emails and make the recipient connect with you on a deeper level.

The second is the lack of genuine connection.

Let’s assume you made a necessarily changes to the email template to make it more personal. This ought to do the trick now, correct?

Wrong.

You should know at this point that there are lots of people doing blogger outreach to different influencers for the reasons stated above.

If you put yourself in the shoes of these influencers, it is safe to assume that you are bombarded with emails requesting for a link back to their excellent post. Take into account that you will have received similar emails from people because they used the exact template.

It has to be a pain for influencers who consistently receive such offers from their inbox. You could imagine them zoning out from such emails because they say the same thing, which is “LOOK AT MY POST, PLEASE LINK TO IT. THANKS!”

Now, if you want to reach out to influencers with your content, what makes you think that they’ll open your email in the first place?

As mentioned, the lack of a genuine relationship between you and an influencer is what’s degrading blogger outreach. First of all, you are essentially cold-emailing them. They have no knowledge that your business even exist, which makes it more difficult for you to get them to perform your desired action.

More importantly, they don’t know who you are. Let’s be honest – you are a nobody to them. So unless you have written an extraordinary email outreach, then there’s a good chance that your pitch will fall on deaf ears (or eyes in the case of emails).

Eliminating both problems from your blogger outreach

To increase your conversion rate from blogger outreach, you need to find a way to remove the issues that are dragging down your campaign.

To do this, you need to follow these steps:

1. Identify the influencers whom you plan to reach out to
2. Strike a connection with them
3. Execute your blogger outreach strategy

I will explain the reasons why you should follow these steps instead of the usual. For now, let’s start by finding the influencers in your niche.

1. Identifying influencers using two tools

This step is common to those who have executed a blogger outreach campaign before. For starters, you can do a quick Twitter search to find influencers who have the most followers in your niche:

The problem with this approach is that it doesn’t drill down different factors that will help us find the right influencer to reach out to.

Buzzsumo

This is where Buzzsumo comes in handy. The tool helps you find the most shared content online for your search query so you can create a much better version of it on your site.

However, for the purpose of searching for influencers, Buzzsumo provides data that no other tool can provide.

Click on the Influencers tab on the menu and enter your keyword in the search bar. After doing so, you will see different variables that you need to consider when choosing people to reach out to.

There are four factors from the Buzzsumo results that you need to focus on: Domain Authority, Retweet Ratio, Reply Ratio, and Average Retweets.

The Domain Authority (DA) is an aggregated score developed by Moz to determine the value of a site. The higher the DA is, the more authoritative it is. Since your goal is to acquire backlinks from influencers, you want to target influencers with sites that have high DA. The backlinks from the domain will help you gain some of its link juice, which is critical in helping elevate your site on search rankings.

Regarding the remaining Twitter factors, obviously, you’d want to target influencers who are highly active on Twitter. I’m not just referring to having a new post every minute of the day. I’m talking about influencers retweeting posts and replying to others. These are indicators that a person is influential in his or her field.

Ninja Outreach

Another tool you can use is Ninja Outreach. In fact, this tool is your be-all-end-all for all your blogger outreach needs.

Click on the Social Prospecting link on the menu and type your keyword in the search bar. The tool will help you identify users with the most following. You can also filter the results based on location, tags, and the minimum followers a user has.

Content Prospecting is where Ninja Outreach truly shines. Type your keyword there and see the best and most relevant results from the tool. It also shows the number of shares, SEO Metrics, and Traffic & Engagement to help you make an informed decision on which content to target on.

You can enter the name of the Buzzsumo influencer you’ve chosen and find content that s/he has written or been mentioned in. Corollary, you should enter the name of the person who wrote the content on Buzzsumo to extract his/her Twitter activity.

Again, you want to target content with the highest rankings on all the provided data of the tool.

We will discuss how you can leverage the results later once we reach the phase of striking a connection with them.

You can export all results from both tools so you can save them on your local drive or the cloud.

2. Strike a connection

This is where the crucial part of your blogger outreach starts.

Instead of taking your chance by sending an outreach email and hoping that the influencer will open it, why not multiply your chances by humanizing your interaction?

Now that you have the data of whom to reach out to and which content, it’s time top put them to good use.

Leaving a social media footprint

First things first, you need to follow the person on social media, whether it’s Twitter or Facebook (assuming that s/he has a page or profile). This immediately gives you an in to reach out to and engage with him/her online.

From here, you should actively retweet, like, or reply to their posts on social media. Since you need a way into the good graces of influencers, the best way to do this is for them to see you appreciate their posts on Facebook and Twitter.

You can simply go to their respective feeds and engage with their messages. You don’t have to engage on every single post they’ve made. Message on those that you best relate with so that your reply won’t feel forced.

They will be notified if you did anything on their posts, so it will be hard to ignore the effort you will put into this.

You can expand your efforts by asking them questions to create a dialogue between you and the influencer. Just make sure that you don’t look like harassing or giving them a hard time with your messages.

Commenting on blogs

For the content you’ve extracted from Ninja Outreach, you’d want to join in the conversation, assuming that there’s a comment section on the post. Whether it’s expressing a sentiment or sharing an idea that wasn’t mentioned in the post, commenting on their blog is an effective way to make a mark in the minds of influencers.

Take a cue from Ryan Biddulph who has made a name for himself by commenting on as many blogs as possible in the most articulate of ways. In an article that he wrote, blog comments are a great way to build a relationship with your readers and audience. The same principle applies in commenting for the purpose of blogger outreach. You want influencers to recognize and be familiar with who you are. If you can’t introduce yourself to them personally, then a blog comment is the next best thing to help you put your foot in the door.

Repeat the process of liking the social media activity and commenting on the blogs of influencers until they have become familiar with yourself as an active part of their community.

Execute your blogger outreach strategy

Now that you’ve laid the foundation by building a stronger connection with influencers with your field, it’s time to carry out your blogger outreach plan and generate backlinks to your site!

Preparing your content

What you want to do now is identify the page on your site that you want influencers to link to. Obviously, it can’t be just any page on your site. You need to provide a value that influencers will find useful and interesting for their audience to give them a reason to link or share it in the first place.

At this point, you will have become acutely aware of their blog content and social media activity. You have an idea of the kinds of posts that they share on a regular basis, as well as the content they create on their blogs. You will also become more familiar with their ideas, theories, needs, and wants from an industry perspective.

Therefore, if you don’t have content that you can use to reach out to your audience, then it’s time to create one from scratch.

Based on the things mentioned above, below are factors that you need to consider before writing your content that will increase your conversion with influencers:

• Does it interest them?
• Will they share it?
• Does it contain information they haven’t discussed yet?
• Are you sharing a radical idea from a different point of view?

If your answer to all these questions is a resounding “YES,” then you are ready to whip up your content.

For starters, you need to learn how to develop a 10x content. This type of content is jam-packed with valuable information that will remain relevant over the years, which automatically makes them link bait content.

Setting up your outreach

Once you have built the content, it’s time to share it to influencers.

As mentioned earlier, Ninja Outreach is a tool you can use to send out your emails to influencers. There are lots of other tools you can use for your blogger outreach strategy, but we’ll settle for this one in the meantime or use a completely white label service recommended for those trying to save time.

Go to Manage Templates and type in the message that will be sent to influencers. While email templates in itself are not ideal, Ninja Outreach helps you personalize your message by adding custom fields that will automatically fill itself out depending on who you send it out to.

Most importantly, the advantage you will now have at this point is having built a relationship with all your influencers. This fact makes it easier for you to connect and reach out to them since they are already familiar with you on social media and their blog.

In fact, you can use this fact to start your email:

Hi, {name}!

I’m {your name}! As you know, I’m a big fan of your work as I’ve actively been participating on your blog and liking your tweets. We’ve even talked about {something related to your field, which segues to the link you want to share with the influencer}.

You can edit the intro as you please. The point is that there’s always an existing relationship at play, so why not use it to help introduce yourself to influencers. This way, you can increase your chances of getting a link from them.

Once you have developed your email, you can click on Outreach Mode and start scheduling your campaign. The great thing about Ninja Outreach is that it will automatically send the message at intervals. Upon clicking for the campaign to be scheduled, all you need to do site back, relax and wait for the results to pour in.

Analyze the results

Once you have capped off your campaign, you can check the results by looking at who replied and who didn’t. Ninja Outreach shows this on each campaign you have launched.

The tool helps you easily filter those who replied, who didn’t, who never opened, and others. You can then follow up on them by sending another campaign to get hold of them again. Also, consider different variables that may have affected their response to your emails such as your subject line, email copy, and others.

Wrapping it up

The right approach to blogger outreach is to build relationships first before sending them an email. By striking a relationship before rolling out your campaign, whether it’s through social media or blog, you gain the trust of influencers, which is arguably the most important thing in digital marketing and a strong white hat seo strategy.

This proceed will double the time you will spend on running your blogger outreach. However, if you truly want results from this undertaking, then better do it right or not do it at all. By following the basic steps and guidelines featured above, you can reach out to as many influencers as possible, if not gain a backlink from them!