Outreach to bloggers and influencers is one of the more obvious tactics for organic promotion, as it can be very effective. However, the space is becoming more and more competitive as bloggers are becoming more aware of the opportunities available to those with a following.
If you know Robby from the Bachelorette and Bachelor in Paradise, you’ll see even he’s been able to score promotions for products like Sugar Bear Hair. So unfortunately for marketers like us, this means that the tactic of working with bloggers and influencers is becoming more expensive.
Because of this, influencer and blogger collaboration should be considered when creating the budget for this type of project. The true goal should be to find influencers or bloggers who are willing to promote your asset for free because they have users who will find it helpful.
When you’re prospecting to identify the right bloggers or influencers to reach out to, we’ve put together a few tips.
First off, think back to the objective of your asset.
What problem does your asset help to solve and how might users search to find solutions to that problem?
By putting yourself in the users’ shoes, manually searching for your target keywords (which should have been determined based on audience pain points), you can find sites already getting visibility for these terms. Referral traffic from one of these sites could send some great, relevant users to your asset.
Second, manually search for bloggers in your space.
Searching for interior design bloggers for the Staples’ Chair Buying Guide led us to a handful of great prospects. If you’re on the fence about whether a prospect is relevant, you can always do a quick site search to identify instances of your target keywords on their domain.
If you don’t see many results return for your site search, maybe that blogger is not a great fit or perhaps you should do some more digging into their content to determine if it’s relevant. If they already have a lot of content on chairs, for example, then this could be a prospect that moves on to the next phase of promotion.
Lastly, Buzzsumo has an influencer search tool that allows you to search by username, topic or target keyword.
It will identify relevant influencers by finding target keyword in their social media bios and will easily display all of their social stats so that you can make an informed decision.
Pro tip: Get bloggers involved in creation
If you’re able to get bloggers to help you create the asset, they can become the best advocates for the final product.
What we did:
- Interviewed interior designers to help guide the content, provide expertise and even provide images to make the asset more visually appealing
- Interior designers were then encouraged to share the asset (because we credited them with photos and bios on the pages they contributed to)
Identify sites linking to similar content
- Another approach to outreach is leveraging the content that’s already out there. The first tactic here is outreach to publishers of trending content similar to your asset. If a publisher just pushed a blog about the best ergonomic chairs, perhaps they’d be interested in our Chair Buying Guide. Using tools like Buzzsumo’s content explorer, you can take this one step further and give publishers some data on their previous posts. Let’s say their post about ergonomic chairs received a ton of social interaction. This data is useful for them to know and can provide some leverage for our ask. Since it appears that their audience is interested in this topic, they might be interested in our Chair Buying Guide, too.
- On a similar note, you can identify assets similar to yours and leverage their backlink profile! Maybe there’s an asset that focuses just on ergonomic chairs, but ours goes way more in depth! Perhaps the people linking to the other resource would be more impressed with ours. As long as we can position our asset as something new, different or beneficial for users in some way, we already have an in because they’re already linking to something similar.
- Lastly, find out who’s already linking to your other pages. It’s not all about links. If a site is familiar with your brand already, there’s a high potential they’ll share your asset either on social or by adding a link to it on their site.
Maybe it doesn’t diversify your link profile, but if it results in referral traffic or greater awareness of your asset, then that’s a win because you’re helping people. You can use any backlink tool for this, but I personally use Ahrefs.
Think outside the box
There are a few other interesting tactics you don’t normally consider when you think of outreach.
- You should be reaching out to your client’s contacts. These people are already familiar with your brand, giving you a foot in the door, which can typically be the most frustrating part of organic outreach.
- Utilize tools like HARO and Profnet to find journalists who are already planning to write about topics relevant to your asset. This can result in quick, easy links to your asset and referral traffic. However, it’s important to note that not all journalists will include your link so you’ll want to follow up and spend some time building a relationship with the journalist to see how you can make the most of the partnership.
- Find users who are asking questions about topics relevant to your asset. Whether this be on Quora, Yahoo! Answers or social media, this is a great opportunity to jump in, answer their question then provide a link to your asset. Make sure your responses are truly helpful, though. Otherwise you might be removed from the forum for appearing spammy.