Hi there SEOmoz readers - I’m Rob and I work at Distilled as an SEO Consultant. Blogger outreach is a topic I’ve spoken about recently at SMX London and I wanted to share some of the tips with you here on the SEOmoz blog.
It’s worth quickly covering off why I think SEOs should be building relationships through outreach - a responsive network of bloggers with whom you have an ongoing conversation can help make your promotion efforts much easier. Contacting bloggers cold and only when you want something is bound to be less successful than if you put the groundwork in first. Like Michael Gray tweeted recently:
So here’s a collection of tips for better and more efficient outreach that have come out of some of the work I’ve been doing recently.
1. Flattery is easier on Twitter
Link request emails typically contain some sort of compliment about the website’s design or content. The trouble is that it often comes across as forced, and sometimes there’s not even a great deal to be complimentary about. When a compliment is obviously a thinly veiled attempt to get in the website owner’s good books, it can have the opposite effect.
Twitter is a much more natural place for this sort of activity - people are always bigging each other up. They RT, #FF, list people, post each other’s blog content, interact, ask questions, and share. It’s totally natural and can be much more subtle, so don’t forget to use all of these tools to get yourself noticed by your link targets.
For example, a month of gentle, regular retweeting and interaction could be the perfect way to build up to a link request email.
2. Finding email addresses can be tough
Website owners often go out of their way to hide their email addresses. They replace them with images, they use contact forms, and often use generic inboxes like [email protected].
At the same time, website owners go out of their way to promote their social media accounts pretty much everywhere they can. They add themselves to directories, put badges all over their sites, link to their profiles at the end of blog posts and more.
It’s pretty easy to work out how some website owners would prefer to be contacted, and finding social media profiles can often take a fraction of the time.
If you know the person’s name then you can often find them with a search like site:twitter.com rob millard. If you don’t know their name, how about searching LinkedIn for their job title and company name? site:linkedin.com inurl:/in/ distilled SEO consultant - easy!
You can also use tools like FollowerWonk, WeFollow, and Twitter’s internal search to find Twitter accounts that are relevant to your niche. Facebook’s internal search can help you do the same.
If you’re familiar with Google Docs and importxml() it’s relatively simple to scrape directories like FollowerWonk and WeFollow, and pull in each user’s web address from their Twitter bio. Once you’ve done that, you could use the SEOmoz API to find out which influential Twitter users actually have blogs worth getting links from.
3. Use Twitter's search to find opportunities
There are a whole host of ways to find link building opportunities using Twitter search. Firstly, check out some of the hashtags used by journalists and bloggers such as #journorequest, #journalistrequest, and #HARO. Combine them which a keyword relevant to your niche and you often get some great opportunities. Speed is crucial though, so make sure you’re quick to respond.
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Advanced search queries for guest posting opportunities are fairly well documented, but you can use a similar approach with Twitter. Check out “guest post” + keyword or “guest blog” + keyword. These aren’t typically blogs asking for guest posts, but they’re promoting guest content which shows that they are likely to accept something similar by yours truly.
If you find that searches and hashtags like the ones mentioned above are yielding opportunities, why not set them up as an extra pane in a Twitter client such as TweetDeck so that you can scan them regularly.
4. Tailor your Guest Posting ideas
When contacting a blogger about guest posting opportunities, I’ve found that I have a much higher success rate if I include a few ideas for headlines straight off. You can make this technique even more effective if you do some quick research to find out what sort of content has worked well for them in the past. Who’s likely to turn down a free post on a subject that earned them loads of links last time round?
So the Top Pages report in OSE is a great place to start – are there any recurring themes that you can pick up on? For example, as a technology blog smartphone content might be way more popular than anything else, so pitch some ideas in that area.
Possibly a better approach would be to look at their site using PostRank as this includes other signals such as social media and number of comments.
Or, again, you could build a tool in Google Docs similar to the one Tom Critchlow outlined here
5. Twitter Lists FTW
My favourite use for lists is to create a private list for users that I’ve identified as outreach targets. This way, you can set up a pane in TweetDeck to monitor what those users are up to and look for opportunities to retweet, interact etc. Obviously a private list is preferred because you’ll blow your chances if somebody realises they’re on a list called “Bloggers to get links from lol”.
On the other hand, you could use public lists as a form of flattery. Create a list called “The world’s best travel bloggers” and then tweet about it. There’s no guarantee that they’ll see it, but you’d hope at least a few of the people on it would check it out.
6. Get an introduction
This is one of my favourite uses for LinkedIn. Typically I tend to avoid actually contacting people through LinkedIn as it can come across just as forced as a cold email. But if you know who you’re targeting, find their profile and check out this box on the right hand side:
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It could be that one of your colleagues already knows them, in which case you can leverage that existing relationship. Or it might be that another business contact knows them, in which case you could ask for an introduction which gives you an easy in.
7. Show your credibility
Apart from the domain name, there’s very little in an email address that demonstrates the credibility of the user. This is another area in which social media’s strengths lie as outreach targets can easily check your profile and work out if you’re the sort of person they want to collaborate with.
As a result, it’s really worth putting in the time to make sure your profile looks authentic and credible. Even the simple things like your profile picture can make a difference – use a photo of your actual face rather than a logo so that people can see who they’re talking to. You can also build credibility by participating in relevant conversations and communities so that you demonstrate that you’re genuinely interested in your niche.
8. Set up custom RSS feeds for key bloggers
This is really at the end of the outreach process, but I often find that I’m contacting bloggers that operate in a niche within my niche. For example, a food blogger might build a relationship with a cupcake blog. If they like to consume content using RSS, it would be much better to give them a feed of posts which are strictly relevant to cupcakes.
Fortunately this is super-easy in Wordpress. Find the relevant tag page or category page such as:
https://www.robsfoodblog.com/tags/cupcakes/
and add /feed/ to the end of the URL:
https://www.robsfoodblog.com/tags/cupcakes/feed/
Score! Obviously this won’t work exactly on every wordpress install as it depends how you’ve got your permalinks set up, but it should be possible if you have a play around.
That’s all for now! Hopefully this post gives you some ideas that might freshen up your outreach strategies. If you’ve got any further ideas or questions, I’d love to hear them in the comments.
Here's what's worked for me recently. 1. Retweeted a few of each target blogger's posts. 2. Created a "round up" post of the month's best articles on the niche at hand. 3. Tweeted to let each blogger whose stories I included know, with a link to the post. Results: each blogger now knows who I am and two of the bloggers tweeted links to my post.
This is exactly the kind of approach that we take to blogger outreach, and we tend to get some results from it too :)
I agree, I've seen the "Best Of" approach work well. Bloggers will probably have Google Alerts set up with their name, and a mention could well bring a link back.
Flattery is a powerful tool :)
The people who are best at social media understand people. How to connect and dare I say, influence.
The 9th tip for blogger outreach can be to find and contact all those bloggers who ever commented on your blog. The best time to contact them is as soon as they have commented with an introductory email in which you formally introduce yourself and thank them for taking out the time to comment on your blog.
These guys are interested in your work and that's why they bothered to comment. Building relationship with them is easier and they can introduce you to other bloggers in your niche. Staying in touch with them is equally important so that they don't forget you when you ask them for a link/guest post later. One good way to stay in touch is by regularly commenting on their blogs and offcourse twitter.
Only say that there are many programs that transform those images into text emails.
Great post! As a blogger who gets a lot of requests for guest posting and links I totally support all of this. It's just so much easier to be contacted and develop relationships via social media. Most other bloggers I know prefer it this way too.
I've had e-mails from people wanting to guest post sent to my personal e-mail not attached from my blog. Those get deleted immediately. Don't contact bloggers where they don't want to be contacted. Almost everyone gives you a preferred method to reach out to them - use it!
In face almost all e-mails wanting guest posts get deleted immediately unless I've already had contact with the person in another area (social media or blogosphere). Honestly it's just too hard to tell the genuine requests from the spammy ones since the e-mails generally sound the same with flattery followed by a request. Taking the time to build a relationship with a blogger takes more time and effort but it will guarantee your e-mail won't get deleted with the rest.
Great ideas for blogger outreach but somtime it can take a while to get moving.
Some advise is some times you need to sweeten the deal, if your company has a tee shirt which is cool like the SEO MOZ one send the blogger the tee shirt in the mail and a nice lil card and talk about who you are and if they want to reach out with a post or to connect they really will. Look at Shoe Money back in the day he loved it when affiliates did that guests posts.
But yeah another cool one is going to industry events which have people from your niche and chat to them about your related sites, build up some contacts and then obtain guest posts via that way.
yeah I hate reaching out to people because most of the time I get responces like: sure but we're gonna charge you money.. freaking sucks.
Valid points, we all know that, the thing is that most people are affraid or lazy to make the change from emailing to using social media for their approach tactics. The answer I always get when I talk about really using social media for contacts and link building is that it takes time and not everyone can do it. The thing is it takes time at the beginning, and even then the resuts are better than sending 100 blind emails. I guess some of us still want to live in the stone age or simply cannot addapt to how fast the web is changing and thus are unable to use those changes to their benefit...
You're absolutely right. People can feel intimidated by social media, especially if they're unfamiliar with it. It's also an investment of time that some people just aren't willing to make. Some people that are unfamiliar with may also not take it seriously, thinking it's just something for kids. However, people will have to make the change or they simply won't keep up. Again, you bring up a very vaild point!
It's interesting that the more things change the more they stay the same. It's really about building relationships with people and doing it over time. In online relationships you have to learn to build a really first good impression. But the worst thing you can do is create a lousy one by asking someone for a favour. I think another analogy is the "Can you spare some change?"
I've had people ask me for money up front, but when they chat and talk to me for five minutes then I tend to warm up a bit. And that's who I see Twitter, for each sentence that's being communicated back and forth, that's a thought be shared in real time. When all the banter back and forth has happened, that's really the equivalent of a warm up conversation that's 3 minutes.
I love the idea of scraping social data and matching it with popular blogs. You could even go as far as creating a quick metric to determine who would be approachable and provide a lot of bang for your buck by comparing several metrics about their site and twitter usage...
Awesome read Rob. You provided some very good tips on how to promote yourself or business without sounding like a desperate entrepreneur who’s just trying to get a back-link trying to increase their link juice. Today, social media pretty much runs the web. Everybody and anybody you know will either have a LinkedIn account, Facebook account, or Twitter account. And if they haven’t , they will have one eventually.As a recap, here’s the list of 7 tips you provided for better outreach:
The good thing about Social Media is when you try to increase your outreach with somebody new, you won’t sound as much of a creep since it’s all online and informal. Kind of like the quote you mentioned by Michael Gray aka @graywolf, “when u ask someone out on a date do u ask for sex right away? when u ask for a guest post do u ask for a dofollow link?”I thought this was a good example of how you should approach people online. As informal as it is, there’s still an unwritten rule of how you should approach people to increase your outreach. I thought the information you provided was good but it seemed like it was heavy on the Twitter side. How would one go about reaching people via Facebook? I would think it’s pretty much similar but FaceBook allows for more functionality. It’ll be interesting to see what the science for “Facebook Outreach”All in all, great read Rob!
Thanks Rob. Just in time for my new outreach plan.
I like that you mentioned using Twitter hashtags to identify opportunities to reach out to other bloggers. I'm actually new to the concept and was wondering if this is something that's primarily done in the U.K and not so much the U.S.
1 moz point
Hi
Nice article for blogs outreach.
But can you please tell me is there any tools for search blogs. or any other idea for blog search.
Kindly help me on this topic it would be a great help for me.
Thanks
Ravi
@theTweet - when I was 10 years junger - maybe yes on both topics x)
nice tweet o.c.
Thanks for this article, Rob. As a recent graduate starting her career in outreach, this is really helpful.
I haven't used Twitter lists yet, but will definitely be putting a few together now!
Great post Rob. Often people say to reach out thru twitter but they don't give practical suggestions that are also about genuinely building relationships, not just using bloggers. Really appreciate the post.
Very cool article, reminds me of the good old days with promoters and print/tv/radio advertising, now just switching them out for bloggers, google adwords/analytics and social media. Virtual reality is such a blast!
Great Post!This is another area in which social media’s strengths lie as outreach targets can easily check your profile and work out if you’re the sort of person they want to collaborate with.
This was a really nice article, with great points regarding developing relationships with Bloggers you are courting. I completely agree with the development of the relationship with the Blogger. But initially finding those Bloggers can be a complete beating...Just to throw our hat in the ring here, and at the risk of sounding too sales-y, https://Business2Blogger.com helps make that initial Blogger contact ridiculously easy. No more Googling or cold-emailing.
Best wishes,
Jay
A really good article. I am a novice at this and looking to build relationships have a couple of blogs for Brighton and trying to do this but also learning from my mistakes along the way!!
Your points are excellent and well taken. The comparison to a first date is perfect for these concepts, as many have forgotten that people only help people they like, trust, and respect. Even in the world of blogging and linking.
I am interested in knowing the opinion of reciprocal links.
As one member already mentioned, he has a tendency to have people write for him first(as he has 5 plus blogs) as this would give incentive to allow him to write for them.
Isn't it safe to assume that one way backlinks are better than reciprocal, or should be of the opinion that reciprocal is better than none?
One Way Link > Reciprocal Link > No Link
:)
So by the sounds of it, utilising a little bit social engineering can help build a stronger impression of yourself with prospective bloggers.
Do you think this will come to a stage where the blackhats will saturate the playing field making it alot harder for a start up'er to get noticed? And as such, would it be best to start building your contacts up as soon as possible even before you're ready to utilise them fully?
A great post never the less :)
I beleive in the Golden Rule of guest blogging. I ask them to do one for me first. We have 4 or 5 blogs with different themes.
Nice post BTW! We use similar tactics in our non on line business development programs to develop relationshipes via Twitter and Linked in.
Terrific post Rob!
I don't think the importance of link building as relationship building is stressed enough in the SEO community. So many talk about scale and raw number of links but truthfully the best links come from actual relationships.
I often tell people when link building to think of the web as a single's bar and you are trying to get the best looking girls' phone numbers. You're not going to get numbers if every girl sees you trying to get every girl's number and you're not going to get numbers if you use the same line on every girl. However if you approach every girl with applicable context and show them why you're worth talking to... you are highly likely to get a number or in this case a link.
I'm loving the proliferation of link building articles and posts lately. Keep up the good work!
Hey,
What about using facebook search in the same way as twitter? Isn't that workable too?
Thanks Rob and great timing, you have given me some helpful reassurance for a report I am writing right now!
I saw you speak at SMX London and thought it was one of the better presentations and now a nice little write up as well, so well done Rob. Totally agree with the "including headlines" or example topics that they can relate to and you think is a good fit for there site.
I've always found that effective especially when I have just gone for the 'fancy a sh*g' on the first date route, at least it shows that you have paid some attention to them/the site
Good article indeed, thanks a lot. Though, I would expand the title to '8 Tips for Blogger Outreach and online marketing tactics', because I strongly believe that your possisble clients are also arround the places where your linking partners are.
Again, it was really interesting to read about what's going on beyond tweeting and retweeting as I still consider myself to be new to twitter (shame on me, I know).
What is the proper way to repost someones blog post? I realize there is a need to provide credit and links to the person who wrote the content.
Is it better to write your own thoughts with links to the blog post or repost in its entirety with credit and links back to the author?
Hey, this is one of those jobs that can have a great rewards, but like all of the best links, it takes time and effort.
It's also something that is much easier if you have an established site with strong content so your guest post is more desirable. The best point here is about tailoring it to their needs as most bloggers will have a hit list of topics that they have not got around to yet so if you are helping them tick something off their list, it's win win!
Thank you. I just start my new Blog and need every information about blogging my head is able to save. So thx for that post.
good points. I have personally found item\service giveaway also a good way to get bloggers interested. The key is NOT to ask for links, and just to do that just to build relationships.
Fantastic post. I smack my head anytime I see/hear someone ask "How can I build links with bloggers quickly?". They are missing the point. It is about the long-term relationship. Learning and interacting with bloggers can have other benefits too, like actual friendships which is an added bonus.
I do love your tip #3. I had never thought to search twitter for "guest posts" but it makes perfect sense.
Thank you for such a well thought-out and consise post.
All very good points.
I would also recommend that you target your outreach campaign very precisely and that you keep ongoing relationship with bloggers in your domain. It's much easier to get a positive outcome from an outreach if the blogger know you.
For targeting, you may want to look at our free lists of top bloggers in different communities (Mom. Tech, Fashion...). The list is usually 200+ deep and we provide twitter ids and social graph: https://socialgps.ecairn.com
Best
Building a strong relationship with a blogger takes a lot of time, but it is certainly worth the effort. These are some great ways to get the ball rolling. I also believe that becoming an active commentor on their blog shows a interest in their work. A long term relationship is worth much more than a few links.
Liking the post. I believe you did this as a webcast? That was decent too.
Last time I checked the links were dead and cant get the webcasts since the move to distilled.net. You should definitely get those up again they were really useful.
:-)
A really great post contains both long-term general principles (such as brainstorming about new ways to build relationships with webmasters) and specific, immediately actionable tips (such as clever ways to search Twitter and LinkedIn). I think one of Twitter's most powerful and undervalued features is the global searchability, and you can bet I'll be now checking out #journorequest from time to time... Thanks!
Hmmm well its very nice to see these tips these are very helpful for those seo who are still working on blogger.
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