1. A Beginners Guide to
Successful Blogger Outreach
Courtesy of your friends at GroupHigh

2. What Exactly is Blogger Outreach?
Blogger outreach is the process of getting heard over millions of other
voices on the web while trying to develop a relationship with influential
bloggers in any given genre.

3. Traditional Marketing is Out
• Studies are showing over and • Before making a big purchase or
over again that traditional aligning themselves with a
marketing is out. Consumers no company, consumers research
longer trust or even pay what people are saying, not
attention to paid for ads. what the brand themselves say.
Consumers want word of mouth.
Here is a great infographic from
HubSpot displaying this point
perfectly.

4. The Point:
•81% of consumers trust information and advice from bloggers.
That’s a lot.

5. Where Blogger Outreach Comes In
• Well, the bloggers are who the consumers are listening to. The
bloggers are the ones that need to be targeted.
• This is our favorite article bursting with statistics on how important it
is that we reach our audience’s influencers aka the bloggers.

6. Who’s Doing it?
Blogger outreach that is….

7. Most Brands
• Well, most brands are doing it.
•77% of marketers are building their brand’s influence with
blogging. That means marketing companies are also becoming
publishers.

8. Content Marketers
• Some marketers are rightfully unsure of their own writing abilities
and outsource to content marketing agencies who specialize in
writing content for their company. That means they are doing a lot of
blogger outreach to get words on other blogs about their client’s
blogs.

9. Pr Agents
• PR agencies have been doing it for years.
• It wasn’t always called blogger outreach but they were reaching out
to the influencers that they wanted on their side. These influencers
are now bloggers and PR agents are one of the biggest groups
executing blogger outreach on a regular basis.

10. Bloggers
• The bloggers themselves are doing it. They are reaching out to other influential
bloggers and collaborating. This could be a recommendation on their own blog or
a swapping of guest posts.

11. Why is Blogger Outreach
Crucial to Marketing?

12. Word of Mouth Works Best
• Again, 81% of consumers trust information and advice from bloggers. If an
influential blogger talks about you or your client’s company or brand, it’s the
same as someone talking you up in the grocery store. Word of mouth works. It
has worked since the beginning of time.

13. Ambassadors
• Bloggers are going to be your company’s most influential ambassadors. Therefore, blogger
outreach campaigns should be part of every company’s marketing practice and they should be
executed often.

14. The Results Tell Us So
• Google Analytics shows us over and over that each blog
mention generates traffic and leads, it is fool proof as long as
we reach these bloggers effectively!

15. Tools to Discover
Bloggers for Your
Campaign

16. Favorite Blogger Outreach Tools
GroupHigh Google Blog Search
• GroupHigh allows you to search • Google Blog search lets you search
for bloggers in every fathomable for blogs in any genre and it’s free.
niche and instantly find their The only drawback is that it’s a
contact information, SEO time sucker. You have to manually
metrics, social media presence find the SEO stats and social media
and other important and info crucial to your campaign.
Contact info is also tough to find
customizable statistics crucial to sometimes. Make sure you always
your campaign. It saves a ton of check the “contact us” or “about
time. us” pages first.

17. Honing in on What you Need
• Before deciding which bloggers you are going to contact, you
need to decide which statistics are crucial to your campaign.

18. Is your campaign visually driven? You
need bloggers with a strong Pinterest
presence.

19. Are you guest posting? A strong Twitter
presence and/or readership is a must.

20. Do you prefer Mozrank or Domain Authority?
Pick a minimum number to determine how
influential a blog’s reach is and stick to it.

21. A list of topics the blog posts about that make
it apparent that this blog is a good fit with
your campaign.

22. How often do they post? If a blog posts more
than 7 times a week, your mention or guest
post may get lost in the shuffle.

23. • Once you’ve found these stats and narrowed down your list
to bloggers that fit each of your criteria, it’s time to pitch.
Ideally, your list is around 100 perfect bloggers for your
campaign. This number represents lot of influence you can
gather but not overwhelming enough that you are tempted
to slack on your pitch…

24. The Pitch
Most important part, no pressure….

25. What is the Pitch?
• The pitch is the virtual handshake and internet introduction.
• You have about 5 seconds to make a good first impression to a
blogger so your pitch better be perfect, no pressure.
• Here is a detailed article on crafting a pitch because I’m going to
condense it here. Keep in mind that successful bloggers get hundreds
of pitches a day and yours needs to stand out.

26. The Pitch Should be….
• Short
• Creative
• Start with a lead
• Clear as to what you have to offer the blogger
• Personalized
• Reference a blog post or popular topic
• Sound like it is from a human
• Thoroughly edited
• Read about the formula for a successful pitch here

27. Let’s talk about
engagement….

28. • Engagement on the blogger’s social media outlets should be done
before and after the pitch. Make yourself stand out before they even
receive your pitch by re-tweeting their words, posting on their
Facebook page, following them on Pinterest and commenting on their
blog posts.

29. • After sending over your pitch, tweet at the blogger right away that “you have a
cool idea for them in their inbox.” This way they know to look for it. Also, it’s okay
to follow up once more. Who knows when the blogger received your pitch? They
could have looked at it in the middle of dinner, been intrigued but completely
forgotten about you.

30. Organization is Crucial

31. • Make sure you have a list of every blogger that you reached out to.
Have a column for when you pitched them, what you pitched them, if
you got a response, and if you got a mention. This is the first of the
two spreadsheets that you need to keep up with throughout to your
campaign. (I’ll get to the other one at the end) This allows you to find
out if you are targeting the right blogs. You should have more “yeses”
than “nos.”

32. Reciprocation is Key
• We talked about reciprocation in the pitch. But make sure
you follow through and show appreciation to a blogger’s
mention or post about you by tweeting it and generating
traffic to their site. If the relationship is successful, the two of
you will work together again.

33. Rookie Mistakes…

34. Don’t do it!
• *Not doing enough “pre outreach • *Pitching a blogger like you would
research” and wasting time on a journalist. Bloggers aren’t
pitching to bloggers who are journalists.
irrelevant to your campaign. • *Sending a one sided pitch. It’s not
• *Not tracking the results of your nice.
campaign to know if it was • *Not looking at all of a bloggers
successful or not. metrics. For example, a blog may
• *Writing a cookie cutter pitch to have a low MozRank because they
bloggers. are new but may have five
thousand Twitter followers. It
would still probably be beneficial.

35. Maintain Your Relationships With
Bloggers
• After posts and engagement have passed, it’s important to maintain
relationships with the bloggers who worked with you. Who knows
when they may be able to benefit another campaign of yours? Keep
in touch and maintain a presence in their blog comments and social
media channels. To get a really thorough rundown on how to
maintain blogger relationships, check out this article.

36. Tracking Your Campaign

37. • Tracking your campaign is crucial to finding out if it was a success or
not. Determine statistics that are important to you or your client
and make a spreadsheet. Use Google Analytics and look at social
media shares to fill out your spreadsheets. Wait about a month
after each post so a sufficient amount of equal time as passed after
each post before recording your data.

38. Popular Metrics to Keep Track of
• Total visitors to site
• New visitors to site
• Bounce rate
• Number of re-tweets
• Number of Facebook likes

39. How to Find out if You are
Mentioned

40. • One of the biggest gripes heard from marketers and PR agents is that
they pitch bloggers and don’t hear back from them but stumble upon
posts months after they were written. What could be more frustrating
than making a successful contact and not even knowing it?
• Here are some tools that you can use to see if your client or company
have been mentioned…

41. Google Alerts
• You can set up through Google to receive an email every time your
client or brand is mentioned. It picks up all the big sites but often
misses smaller sites and blogs that mention you.

42. Social Mention
• Social Mention allows you to type in your company or client’s name
and find out which outlets are talking about you including YouTube,
twitter and Facebook just to name a few. You can create a “social
alert” which is like Google alerts but for social media mentions.

43. HootSuite
• Make sure you’re set up with HootSuite. Sometimes a blogger will
Tweet at you if they post about you.

44. IceRocket
• IceRocket is a search engine that brings up blog posts, twitter and
Facebook mentions of your brand. It brought up everything that
Kurrently brought up for GroupHigh social media mentions but also
showed blog mentions.

45. Technorati
• Technorati searches over a million indexed blogs in the blogosphere
for mentions of your brand. It allows you to post comments and
feedback on the blog posts- yay you can join in the conversation
about your own brand. However, when we typed in “GroupHigh,” the
blog posts that showed up in IceRocket didn’t show up in Technorati.

46. BoardTracker
• BoardTracker lets you search for what is being said about you on
forums and discussions.

47. A Regular Old Internet Search
• It’s also not a bad idea to perform an internet search and see what
sites pop up first. You want to be familiar with this because most
consumers are Googling you and/or your brand before purchasing.
How can you use what pops up in your marketing plan? Are there any
negative reviews of you that pop up? If so, your priority is damage
control!

48. Reflection Time

49. You’ve found all of your mentions and posts and you’ve filled in your
spreadsheets.
Get both spread sheets out and set side by side somewhere you are
cozy because it’s reflection time! Each campaign is going to teach you
something new and useful for the next one as long as you read the
messages in the metrics that you gather.

50.  On your first spreadsheet, did you get a positive response
from at least 33% of the bloggers you reached out to?
 If not you need to figure out why. Did you not throw a
good pitch? Maybe you reached out to the wrong
bloggers? Did you have something to reciprocate to them?
Did they have a similar MozRank to yours, did you reach
out to bloggers out of your league? Answer these
questions to yourself and try to figure out how you can
hone in on bloggers more effectively for your next
campaign.
 If you did get a lot of positive responses from bloggers,
make note of what you did write and do it again!

51. On you next spread sheet, look at the blogs that brought a lot of
traffic to you or your client’s site. Put stars by these and make sure
to keep them in mind for future campaigns. Make sure that you
engage with these bloggers frequently.
Also, thoroughly analyze each blogger that brought a lot of traffic.
Was it the blogger’s influence or the mention or post itself? Try to
mimic what worked for future campaigns.

52. Resources to Keep on Top of Content
Marketing and Blogger Outreach
• Content Marketing Institute is the authority on all things content marketing
• GroupHigh’s blogger outreach blog is full of tips on blogger outreach
• CopyBlogger is a blog that keeps you up to date on the world of blogging
• Pratik Dholakiya is a prolific guest poster about blogging. Follow him
@DholakiyaPratik so you don’t miss any of his words
• Kikolani is a blog about blogging tips and is full of good advice
• Convince and Convert is full of good tips on social media and content
maketing
• Sally Falkow is a brilliant PR Strategist with a ton of good advice

53. About GroupHigh
• GroupHigh is an all encompassing platform that allows users to:
• Search for blogs in any genre or niche
• Import blogs
• Find statistics, metrics, social media info, and contact information for any blog
• Track and organize outreach campaigns with some awesome features

54. To Stay Up to Date on Blogger Outreach
Follow GroupHigh
• Demo our software
• Follow us on Twitter
• Like us on Facebook
• Read our awesome blog
• Join our blogger outreach discussion group