Blogger outreach is a tedious and time-consuming task, but its impact and success rate can never be denied as an effective tool for influencer marketing, relationship building, and other marketing collaborations.
Some years ago, it took a manual approach to do outreach. But now, thanks to the abundance of blogger outreach tools, part of the process can be automated, scheduled, scaled, and executed with minimal effort.
You can now find webmasters' contact information, create outreach emails, use templates, send follow up, and manage the process without leaving the outreach app.
There are lots of bloggers' outreach services and tools today that make the process less time-consuming and allow you to scale your effort at an incredible pace.
We are going to discuss some of the most popular ones here...but, just in case the term blogger outreach is new to you, let's cover some of the basic
What is Blogger Outreach?
Blogger outreach in its simplest definition is the process of building communication lines, networking, and business relationships with relevant marketers in a strategic way to achieve a marketing goal.
The goals could range from finding guest posts opportunity, link partners, sponsored posts, influencer marketing, collaboration, content promotion, etc...
If you've been blogging for a while, and your blog attracts decent traffic, you've probably received one or two bloggers' outreach emails from strangers asking for a marketing favor.
Here is an example...
That's a good example of what a blogger outreach message is. Whether it is spam or not, it is for another day's discussion. For now, let's check out some of the benefits of doing blogger outreach.
What are The Benefits of Blogger Outreach?
There are numerous benefits of an effective blogger outreach strategy, let's discuss some of these benefits below.
#1. Well Targeted Marketing
One of the benefits of blogger outreach worth consideration is audience targeting.
Except you're applying the short-gun blogger outreach approach, you don't just send emails to random prospects.
You will get the most out of your outreach campaign when you narrow down your target list to focus on the people who are highly relevant to your campaign. You will be connecting with relevant marketers in your niche and an audience interested in your content.
#2. Relationship Building
Reaching out to relevant influencers, bloggers, and marketers in a private and personalized communication channel builds a bond of connection that could be helpful for short and long-term gains.
You're able to reach out whenever necessary to share ideas, help each other, and move your business forward. And the good part, you can scale your outreach efforts using tools that help simplify the processes.
#3. Link building
No doubt, outreach is one of the best link-building strategies.
Links can be earned or built.
Earning links is not easy, it takes time to reach the level at which other websites will naturally link to you.
The next and best option is to turn to blogger outreach to find link partners. People who are more likely to swap link-building deals with you. With blogger outreach, you can find lots of potential link partners that are willing to accept your link-building offer.
For more information on link building vs link earning, read this comprehensive guide.
#4. Cost-effective
Blogger outreach is cost-effective in the sense that it doesn't require a huge amount of budget to execute compared to other marketing channels.
You can set aside a specific marketing budget to promote your content across other bloggers' blogs or negotiate on what service the blogger can render for your budget.
And you'll get exactly what you paid for.
#5. Improve Online Visibility
There are blogger outreach services that help brands with increasing awareness, building relationships, and promoting the company via various marketing channels.
For small business owners, this can be a great tool to expand your reach, build awareness and increase search visibility.
#6. Easy to Track Measurable
Measuring SEO and marketing campaigns is important to know where your efforts are yielding positive results and where to focus more resources and energy.
With blogger outreach, it's easy to track and measure your efforts vs the outcome. You can easily track the number of contacts vs positive responses. It is not as complicated as tracking SEO efforts on search ranking.
And tracking link placement or the performance is straightforward. You can see if the link results in traffic or not.
Types of Blogger Outreach
There could be many reasons for marketers to involve in outreach, but I've found these five as the common types of blogger outreach.
As someone who receives dozens of cold email outreach every week, I know for sure that these five listed here top the list.
#1. Link Building
At the top of the list of why marketers are using blogger outreach is link building.
As I said earlier, waiting for people to naturally link to your content is not going to happen sooner in your blogging career. Unless you're Neil Patel or Moz, people won't link to you, you need to go out and seek a link opportunity yourself.
This is why you'll see many bloggers and companies invest in blogger outreach to build a solid link profile.
#2. Guest Blogging
Another reason for blogger outreach is guest posting.
Many blogs don't have a guest blogger submission page, but if you can connect with the editors internally, you may be accepted to be featured on the blog.
Also, if you have a blog with a decent traffic level and high DA, you probably will be seeing this type of blogger outreach email on a regular basis.
#3. Content Promotion
Your best work won't be noticed unless you promote it - that's how it works in online marketing. There is too much noise out there for anyone to pay attention to everything that comes online.
That's why marketers have started using blogger outreach to promote their best content. It is an effective marketing tool to get your content in front of a targeted audience.
Content promotion is another type of blogger outreach campaign I have seen almost all the time.
#4. Product or Service Promotion
Companies and brands are mostly the ones involved in this type of blogger outreach. If you have a product or service that just hit the market, leveraging this tactic can make a huge difference in its viral effect.
You connect with relevant authority sites to create content promoting your products or services to their audience, such as product reviews, case studies, flash sales, etc.
This can bring more benefits aside from the obvious promotional awareness:
- Increase search visibility
- Brand awareness
- Increase social media followers
- Backlinks
- Drive more website traffic
- Drive more conversion and ultimately increase sales.
#5. Sponsored Post
Like paid links, marketers and companies also love to sponsor posts on blogs they perceive as good assets for their business.
This type of outreach always involves incentives mostly in the form of money, free premium account signup, gifts, etc...usually, there is always something of value in return for the host blogger.
Sponsored posts are not the same as guest posting; guest posts are mostly from industry bloggers with personal blogs, while sponsored posts are mostly from startups looking to establish their brands and increase awareness.
5 Best Blogger Outreach Tools for Influencer Marketing
This list consists of different outreach tools; from tools for influencer marketing, guest blogging, link building and to the ones that let you automate every step of the process, you'll find recommendations that will be helpful to your business.
Let's dive deep...
#1. BuzzSumo
BuzzSumo is widely known and used as a content research and marketing tool, but it is also a blogger outreach tool. It is one of the few tools used by top industry brands such as Telegraph, Ogilvy, BuzzFeed, Hubspot, etc.
BuzzSumo can help your outreach campaign in many ways:
- Find influencers in any niche with an active social media following. Influencer account with active and engaged followers.
- Used BuzzSumo for content research and for promotion. BuzzSumo lets you discover top-performing content in any niche so you can build upon already working ideas and make your content better.
- Monitor what matters to you and your business so you can seize opportunities and respond timely to relevant discussions. The tool lets you keep track of brand mentions, topics, competitors, and emerging products/services.
- You can also use it for content research and analysis. With BuzzSumo, you can see through a competitor's social media data, and content backlink profile. This provides link-building opportunities from relevant sources.
BuzzSumo Pricing
There is a free account that allows 10 free searches per month, 1 year back in time historical data, and 1 custom feed.
The premium account starts at $99/month or $948 per annual billing. It allows up to 10 custom feeds, unlimited projects, 5 user accounts, unlimited monthly search, and more.
You can go through other higher plans and features on this page or take the 30-day BuzzSumo free trial offer here. The free trial lets you explore all BuzzSumo features to decide if it's right for you.
#2. Semrush
Semrush is a BIG name in the SEO industry, no introduction is needed.
But did you know that Semrush also offers an outreach tool? Yes, there is...
The Semrush link-building tool allows you to manage your outreach campaign, find link partners, send emails using templates, do follow up, and monitor the progress.
These are cool features since most link-building strategies always result in reaching out to people, it is a good idea to have such features built into it. If you want to learn more about the Semrush link-building outreach tool, read this post.
You can manage several outreach strategies within the app:
- Guest post
- Product Review
- Link insertion
- Link recovery
- Manual link building
- Directory and catalog
- Link from mention
- Create your custom outreach strategy
Semrush Price
Semrush Pro starts at $119.95/month, while the Guru starts at $229.95, and the Business plan starts at $449.95/month.
You can take up the free 7-day trial offer if you'd like to test-drive the tool before committing your hard-earned money.
#3. BuzzStream
Buzzstream is one of the most popular outreach software in the market. It offers a variety of tools that make blogger outreach strategies efficient and effective.
If you want to build your digital PR and scale outreach efforts to the maximum, BuzzStream is one tool you should use. It works in a way similar to other tools on the list; research influencers on different platforms, manage the relationship and send personalized outreach messages.
BuzzStream is the home for some of the big brands in the industry - 99design, Canva, Airbnb, glassdoor, indeed, and more.
Some of its top features include:
- Segmentation - the ability to filter and segment your list based on different parameters. You can filter by follower count, relationship, domain authority, and more.
- Lead Collection - With the Buzzstream browser extension, you can collect leads on the web and add them to your list with a few clicks. As you browse the web and discover interesting links, web pages, or social media power users, you can add them to your contact list in Buzzstream.
- Email Templates - Create your own templates or choose from the available options to get you started in minutes.
- Report - The reporting feature allows you to see which email subject line and email templates perform better so you can improve on the next campaign.
Buzzstream Pricing
Buzzstream offers a 14-day free trial of its plans. And if you choose to upgrade thereafter, the starter plan costs $24/month.
This plan allows up to 1,000 link monitoring, email templates, schedule, and reminder. You also have access to the Twitter conversation tracking feature and Chrome extension.
Check out the full list of Buzzstream features in the link below.
#4. Awario
Awario is a web listening and monitoring tool, but it lets you do outreach with ease. The tool allows monitoring of business-related search queries and influencer marketing to seek guest post opportunities.
Awario lets you identify top marketing influencers across all social media channels, in any language, location, and across multiple platforms.
And with the Awario lead feature, you get sales opportunity recommendations from unhappy customers looking for product alternatives similar to yours.
Here are the highlight of the Awario Feature and use case:
- Boolean Search - Flexible search operator to prioritize your search queries to only report the most relevant discussions.
- Social Selling - It is a social media feed of potential customers looking for products or services related to your business. This is a very helpful tool to build momentum for your business.
- White-label report - Share your analytics report with clients, business associates, and friends with a beautifully designed PDF report. You can create the report, export it, download or it in HTML format.
- Email Alert - Setup and customize your email alert to weekly or daily so you don't miss out on any important notifications.
- Powerful Analytics - Track and analyze your web mentions across platforms and apps. You can sort by mentions, positive, negative, and natural. You can compare platform performance, identify influencers by platforms, etc.
Awario Pricing
The plan starts at $24/month for the annual billing and $39/month for the monthly payment.
However, you can sign up for a free trial account which gives you access to the starter plan. You don't need to enter credit card details.
Sign up below to test Awario today.
#5. Link-Assistant
This is a link-building and blogger outreach tool from the creator of SEO powersuite. It is a desktop-based software. This means you download and install it on your desktop computer.
The tool offers an impressive 7 outreach strategies to run your campaign:
- Guest Post
- Product and Services Review
- Top Ranking Pages
- Similar website
- Backlink Gap
- Competitor's newly acquired backlinks
- And Expert Mode - customize your outreach strategy
Link-Assistant is a powerful link-building and blogger outreach tool. Within the tool, you can find prospects at scale, verify email contact, create your outreach email, receive replies, send follow up, see domain traffic metrics, verify link status on partner websites, and link attributes, etc.
If you're looking for a guest post outreach tool that lets you find a host website from multiple sources, this is one tool to try.
Link-Assistant Pricing
- $99/year for the professional license
- $199/year for the enterprise license
Editor's Pick - Best Blogger Outreach Tools
The list above is a very tough one to settle for a winner, seriously. All the outreach tools mentioned above are above the bar.
So my choice will depend on a variety of factors.
If you're looking for something along the lines of link builder per se, I will recommend Link-Assistant and Semrush. This is because these tools are heavily focused on SEO link-building tactics.
They offer helpful features and tools that let you build links at scale, and make management painless.
But if you're looking for tools for social and web monitoring and influencer marketing, Awario and Buzzstream are the go-to.
Conclusion... Blogger Outreach Tools
There is no dying the fact that blogger outreach is an effective marketing strategy that brings positive outcomes, but it is not everyone's cup of tea.
If you're not using the right tool or blogger outreach services, the task could be time-consuming and overwhelming. Going through the list above should help you solve the problem of finding the right blogger outreach tool for your next campaign.
