Thinking of launching a blogger outreach campaign? That’s a really good idea. Blogger outreach is a great way to reach a new, wider audience, boost your online presence, and help to position you as the go-to expert in your field.

But what is blogger outreach exactly and how do you find relevant bloggers in your niche? We answer these 2 questions and many more as we take a look at the 10 most common blogger outreach questions.

1) What Is Blogger Outreach?

The concept of blogger outreach is really simple: It’s when businesses work with established bloggers and websites in their niche to produce content with the aim of getting more exposure, bringing in some valuable referral traffic, and earning valuable backlinks.

Types of content can include normal and sponsored posts, giveaways, product features, product reviews, and so on. Depending on the type of collaboration, this can mean that the content is produced solely by you (like a guest post), solely by the blogger, or with you two working together.

While you can argue that blogger outreach isn’t the same thing as guest posting, it is most often used that way.

2) How Do I Recognise Good Blogs To Reach Out To?

Your ultimate aim should be to find authoritative, relevant blogs in your niche. You can use an SEO tool to determine key things like:

  • Traffic
  • Domain strength
  • Overall site quality (by reviewing the quality of their backlinks)

Here is a screenshot from Ahrefs that shows estimated domain strength and organic traffic for this blog:

Site inspection example

As you can imagine, the higher the blog scores on each front, the more value you can get from them.

Besides everything mentioned, it is also really important that the site is relevant to your niche. After all, what is the point of getting exposure on a site that isn’t visited by your target audience?

3) How Do I Find Relevant Blogs In My Niche?

There are a few different methods you can use to find sites worth reaching out to:

  1. Googling for relevant sites is still an option. For instance, you can type your niche into Google followed by “write for us” or “guest posting guidelines”. Here is an example: marketing + “write for us”. You can find more info here for this method.
  2. Many blogger outreach tools will help you find relevant blogs through their prospecting options. We will talk more about these tools a few questions below.
  3. You can use backlink tools such as Ahrefs, SEMrush, and Moz to see who links to your competitors, which is a great way to find sites and bloggers that might be interested in working with you too.
  4. Directories like Blog Lovin and Spill Bean. While not our favorite method, they can be a legitimate option for someone who doesn’t have access to a blogger outreach tool with prospecting features.

4) How Do I Write a Good Pitch?

The pitch is key as it’s your one chance to impress the blogger. Having a bad pitch is probably the easiest way to kill your blogger outreach chances.

It’s really important that you catch them immediately with a standout subject line that perhaps mentions an interesting stat relevant to your topic idea.

Also, don’t forget to introduce yourself, explain who you’re working for, and state your reasons for reaching out.

If you are using blogger outreach just to build links by publishing guest posts, according to our own research on how to write a good guest post pitch, the 3 most important elements of a pitch are:

  1. Interesting topic suggestion
  2. Lots of personalization
  3. Detailed topic descriptions/outlines

pitch elements

5) How Do I Find Someone’s Email Address?

There are lots of free email finder tools you can use to find someone’s email address.

Alternatively, you could just find them on social media and either send them a direct message or interact with them in the comments of their articles and social posts.

There’s also the option of checking out a website and have a look around until you find the right person details. For example, you can check the “contact us” page, the “about page”, as well as the team page. If the website has a guest posting guidelines page, it is likely that you should be able to find the right contact info there.

6) How Many Follow-Up Emails Should I Send?

It’s likely that you won’t hear from a blogger straight away. As determined as you might be to get a response, it’s important that you don’t get carried away by inundating them with spammy emails.

At the same time, there’s absolutely no reason why you can’t send them at least one follow-up email. Sometimes, the blogger was too busy to reply, or they simply didn’t see your email the first time around. Our internal data shows that 40-50% of positive replies come from a follow-up email.

We recommend send one follow-up email to re-establish contact, and a second one if it’s something really important. But no more.

7) What Are The Best Blogger Outreach Tools?

If you are planning to send a double-digit number of emails every month, having a blogger outreach tool will be immensely helpful.

That is because they can help you in many different ways like:

  • finding relevant blogs
  • finding contact information
  • managing communications through personalized templates
  • sending automated follow-ups

The bottom line is this, they help you significantly streamline the whole process which saves you A LOT of time if you are doing this at a scale.

We personally use Pitchbox, but there are other good tools out there like Ninja Outreach and Buzzstream. For more info, you can refer to this in-depth review of best blogger outreach tools on the market.

8) How Do I Increase Outreach Response Rates?

If you’re sending a lot of emails but mostly getting negative replies, you need to take a look at your pitch as there are a few reasons why potential prospects haven’t replied:

  • Your email wasn’t personalized enough, in which case you should address them by their name and learn a bit more about them and their website – and use what you learn in the pitch.
  • You’ve talked about yourself too much and not enough about them. It’s really important that you outline how the blogger will benefit from this. Show what kind of value you can provide.
  • You’re just not the right fit. Make sure to get an understanding of any blog you decide you want to work with. It’s key that your style, topic, and message matches theirs.

If you notice that bloggers aren’t even opening your emails, you might want to take another look at your subject lines. Here is a good piece on how to make your subject lines more compelling

9) How Can I Track My Blogger Outreach Results?

The easiest way to track results is to check to see if your organic traffic has increased and if the authority of your domain is getting stronger. You can use Google Analytics or your SEO tool to check different metrics, as well as referral traffic you are getting from your published content. Has there been an upshoot?

Additionally, you can use social listening or some mention tools to find out if your brand name is getting thrown around more often.

As a quick side note, if you are working with bloggers in the context of sponsored posts, product reviews or anything else where you want to accurately track how much traffic you are getting from specific links, you can do that by using UTM codes.

10) Should I Outsource Blogger Outreach To Someone Or Do It Myself?

It all comes down to 3 things: skills, time, and manpower. Do you have the right skills to find appropriate sites, create engaging content and enough time to manage everything? Blogger outreach is very effective when done properly, but it is a very time-consuming process.

If you know what you’re doing and have enough time and manpower, feel free to make your own internal blogger outreach team. You could have someone in charge of scouting out blogs, someone in charge of creating pitches and managing communications, and someone in charge of writing the content.

If one of these 3 things is missing however, you are probably better off outsourcing blogger outreach to an agency that already has this process streamlined. You will often find out that this is actually a cheaper option in the long run.

Dario Supan is a content strategist and editor at Point Visible, a marketing agency providing custom outreach and link building service. When he isn’t neck deep in outreach projects and editorial calendars, you will most likely find him designing a custom graphic for his next exciting post.