Blogger Outreach Guide For Businesses

blogger outreach guide

Blogger outreach for business is a lucrative marketing method every business or person should apply. With nearly half a billion blogs out there, it’s inevitable you’ll find relevant bloggers to reach out to and get SEO value from. 

I’ll guide you through the steps of blogger outreach, from how to find them, and what to say to them. So let’s start reach out to bloggers and improve our backlink profile for SEO with our blogger outreach guide! 

What Can You Get From Reaching Out To Bloggers? 

This depends on what do you want to achieve with your blog outreach. The most obvious thing is meeting new people and networking. This alone can lead to business opportunities aside from guest blogging and blog outreach backlink building benefits. 

There are several methods most people use blogger outreach for according to Neil Patel Digital.  


Blogger Outreach Guide Essentials


● If you want to promote your website or piece of content, you can get links to your website from authority blogs by doing guest posts and sharing your expert opinion elsewhere. Search engine optimization and content marketing experts and agencies can also assist you with the blog outreach and guest posting process.

● You can also get great exposure for your blog and blogger outreach on huge social media channels. For example, I used the same approach for one of my clients. In one article about cars, we mentioned 5 different car museums, reached out to them (asking for shares) and got that article shared with 1 million of their followers. 

● With blogger outreach, your whole brand can become more visible on the web. By reaching out to others in your niche, you can land collaboration gigs, like getting bloggers to review your products on their website, etc. 

So, how do you find the right people to connect with, you wonder? Read on further in our blogger outreach guide… 

Finding The Right Match Bloggers 

Start with using Google to prospect the blogosphere for good candidates. With Google search, you can use only keywords (search phrases), or keyword + search query formula, like if you want to find sites for guest posting. 

The queries for finding blogs that accept guest contributors are many, and these are some good ones to use (tried & tested). 

● Your phrase + “write for us” 
● your phrase "Guest Post Guidelines” 
● your phrase "Submit a Guest Post” 

Every query will give you different results. However, the query you put in the search bar is not as critical as the keyword you choose. 

Let’s say you offer dog walking as a service. You want to find blogs that are not your exact competitors, rather blogs in your niche, or a niche broader if your own niche is too small. For dog walking, any pet blogs will do. Likewise, parenting blogs writing about pets could also be your match. 

So, you will not use the keyword “dog walking” to prospect bloggers, you need to think broader. You can use keywords like “best dogs for kids” to find blogs that mention dogs but are not your adversaries. 

If you are tech savvy, you can expedite this prospecting phase using some SEO tools, like Ahrefs. 

Ahrefs has a cool feature called “content explorer” that allows you to insert your keyword and exclude competition with only a few clicks. That way, you don’t have to be so meticulous with keywords. 

Plus, you can choose whether Ahrefs should find your keyword phrase in the blog’s title, in the URL, or in the content. 

In the results, you will see the authority of the found blogs, their traffic levels, popularity on social media – so you can tailor your approach and desired results based on that information. It wouldn’t make sense to contact blogs that have a poor following, and ask for shares, right? 

This tool allows you to exclude blogs that are already linking to your website, to pick results based on the language, and to exclude specific terms – like “services” (to remove competitors) or YouTube, etc. 

Ahrefs has very detailed settings options, but for the sake of brevity here, we will not explain every single option. 

At the end, you can find your ideal candidates for blogger outreach by browsing through Twitter or LinkedIn. 

LinkedIn search can lead you to professionals, groups, and official pages of websites (mobile phone and desktop you could reach out to if you put your niche + blogger in the search bar. 

Check the results for a not so popular phrase as a “pet blog”. 

When I looked at the Pet Bloggers Group – it showed me, there are 516 members in that group. If you would apply this search to a more popular niche like digital marketing, the number of useful contacts would be 10x. 

You can do the same search on Twitter. 

Preparing For Blog Outreach 

Although many would jump right to the fire, one of the most important parts for blogger outreach is preparation. Like in other spheres of life. 

If you prepare, you’d be able to better tailor your pitch to your chosen blogger and you won’t seem like a spammer, rather an authentic person who knows what she wants, provides value to the other side and doesn’t waste their time. 

1. Why You Should Read The Guidelines 

The best way to increase your chances of blogger outreach success before hitting send email is to read the guidelines page if the blog has one. Not all the websites will, but the majority does as pitching guest posts is a popular activity, so bloggers use the guidelines page to make it easy both for themselves and others with pre-prepared instructions. 

If your blogger outreach goal is to publish a guest article, guidelines are an excellent source of information that can tell you what to write about, what the respective blog wants and what they do not accept. 

Guidelines page often provides other data about their readers, their price for guest articles, etc. 

Sometimes, you will find this information on their “about” or “contact us” pages, or even in the site’s sidebar or footer area. So, be sure to check these pages, ideally in that order. 

Regardless of whether you find the information on a guidelines page, I would advise you to read the website’s “about us” page. 

There, you will often find great insights into what the blogger likes that will later help you craft and personalize your outreach email. 

If you struggle to find any useful information on a website you want to contact, the last resort is to put the following search query in Google’s search bar: 

● site:theirwebsite.com guidelines 

If it exists, you will find the guidelines page. 

2. Read A Few Articles For More Personal Blogger Outreach

Many consider browsing through the blog’s articles and reading them as a waste of time, but there is a better way of doing blogger outreach and I find this to be a logical step you shouldn’t skip. 

Let me compare blogger outreach to cold outreach for sales. 

When you reach out to other companies to offer your services, where the CEO doesn’t have a LinkedIn profile, he barely has a functional website because his company manufactures metal parts – it is hard to find a useful piece of information on the person or the company. 

It might be hard to believe, but in 2019, there are still companies with tens of millions of yearly revenue without a website, with a petty digital footprint (web designers, what are you waiting for?) 

This comparison is to explain how when you are doing blogger outreach, bloggers actually lay out information on the platter. It is very accessible, and the only thing you need to do is to show a little effort. 

90% of bloggers will have a guidelines page with plenty of information, but not all of them will. One thing every blog has and cannot hide is their content. 

Invest 10-20 minutes to read a few newest post you find interesting and you will get a good impression on their favorite topics, their writing style, whether they like long or short blog posts, etc. 

This effort will help you determine if that blog is a good fit for your topic (if you are intending guest posting), but it will be of great use later when you curate your email message and personalize it based on the things you’ve read. 

3. Ways To Come Up With An Article Idea (Guest Posting Only) 

* You can skip this part if you only want to ask for shares or collaborate with blogs in another way. 

There are a few angles to plan a suitable topic to offer. 

Angle #1 

Use Google to find the top blogs in your niche and analyze the topics they are covering. 

Angle #2 

Switch the words in the article title. For example, should the article title be “10 best dog breeds for toddlers”, you can rename it to “10 best dog breeds for busy families”. For dog walkers – busy families are spot on. 

This is the same approach SEO pro Neil Patel advised. You find the topic on Lifehacker, Pets.com, or any popular blog of your niche and you replace a few words in their article titles. 

Angle #3 

Use the theme generator tools like HubSpot. Put your keyword in and let the chosen tool do its magic. 

Angle #4 

More tools! If you are familiar with SEO tools like SEMrush, Buzzsumo, or the aforementioned Ahrefs, you can use them to check the top pages popular blogs rank for. 

In both SEMrush and Ahrefs, you can see which top pages and which top keywords are bringing the most traffic to those websites. By looking at that data, you find awesome titles. 

Angle #5 

Once you get the general idea on what to write about, Google it. See what others are doing to make your own mashup and craft 3-4 versions of the post title using various ideas you found on others’ blogs. Then pick one you fancy the most. 

Sending Your Blogger Outreach Email 

Everybody is using email templates nowadays, and this is good to get the first idea. I am a big supporter of the crawl-walk-run learning and using templates is a way to make it easy for you in your beginnings. 

However, try to go the extra mile and personalize that template as much as you can. Sending a generic email that doesn’t speak to that specific person is problematic because: 

a) You don’t want to sound like a thousand other people. You want to stand out, be remembered and connect with the person on the other end. If the person that receives your generic email realizes you are using a template, you become an automaton in their eyes. We all love when someone makes the effort for us and bloggers are no exception. 

b) If you are sending the same blogger outreach email (with the same topic idea) to everyone, some parts of your email will come up unnatural sooner or later. The impression is like an article spun by a computer where certain parts are just badly interpreted and sound fake. 

The solution to these blog outreach problems is? 

Personalization is key for blogger outreach success

ABC in blogger outreach stands for Always Be Customizing. Do that so the emails you send sound authentic and consider any template you come across as nothing but a framework that guides you. 

How To Personalize Blogger Outreach Emails

My first advice is to go beyond the name. Look for a personal connection with the posts you liked on the blog you are reaching out to. Provide the WHY to the reason you like that post. 

Use the “content upgrade” angle. A follow-up topic is a great way to use for guest posting outreach. 

You find the topic you prefer that you could enrich and expand. Then you contact the blogger listing the things you liked about that article and offer your unique point of view on that topic and say you would love to write a follow-up post that will pair up with that existing one. You are offering to write a part 2 article. 

That helps bloggers maintain topical consistency and gives them a chance to reference their old post. 

Although I am not a fan of templates, one template you can scale your outreach on is “first paragraph personalization”. Use the first two sentences of your email copy to connect with the recipient. 

The formula goes like this: 

● Mention their article + WHY you liked it (make it personal and unique) 
● Mention their tweet + WHY you retweeted / your positive opinion 

You get a general idea. Add humor and personalization in your blog outreach emails wherever possible!

How Much Blog Outreach Follow Up Is Too Much? 

You can follow up once, or twice if you have a good reason, but don’t overdo it. Blogger outreach is not sales outreach. 

Bloggers are busy people, everyone can overlook an email for a day or two. Plus, the number of emails in our inboxes grew over the last few years. 

Many promote the follow-up method as a good strategy. However, be careful with this, following up should depend on what are you doing. 

In sales, it is normal to follow up on people even over 8 times, to bombard prospects via multichannel. You use cold calling, cold emailing, LinkedIn, and even text messaging. 

This is normal in sales, as you can pitch your offer only once, and you have only one offer to pitch – your service and your business. It’s not like you’ll start a new service and a new firm in a few months. 

Besides that, CEOs of your prospected businesses constantly receive outreach emails, so this approach requires more persistence. 

Blogger outreach is another story. Here, if the blogger didn’t like your offer, it doesn’t mean goodbye forever. In 3 to 6 months you might have a new blog post or a different reason to reach out, so you don’t want to spoil your relationship by blasting needy follow-ups 

The rule number one in blogger outreach is – don’t burn your bridges! 

Here’s a second rule of this blogger outreach guide for you to use – talk to them as you were talking to a friend. 

Would you send 25 follow-ups to your friends’ email or Facebook message? I suppose not. Maybe you would ping them once after a few days just to see if they missed your message in a haste. However, I doubt you’d spam your friends with countless emails saying “just sending this to float on the top of your inbox”. Keep that in mind with your blog outreach outreach.

You also obviously shouldn't try to shame, embarrass, blackmail, or threaten any potential bloggers into providing you with links. This blogger outreach guide would not advise using any such tactic, but unfortunately it does happen.

Build Your Blogger Outreach With This Guide

Blogger outreach can have different turns, target various goals, and take you on the road to SEO success you never thought you'd travel down. 

In a nutshell, blogger outreach all boils down to practice, learning from your mistakes and making necessary SEO tweaks to improve. 

This blogger outreach guide post scratched the surface of blog outreach when it comes to scaling it big, but hopefully, it helped you understand the fundamentals and encouraged you to give it a go. 

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