Running an outreach campaign can be a whole heap of work. Especially if you have hundreds of prospects on your to-mail list.
But the amount of possibilities that open up once you establish contact with another blogger, influencer, or businessman makes it all worth it.
Take guest posting for example. It is a great way of getting your content out there, present it to a new audience, and get a few backlinks along the way.
But if you don’t treat other bloggers as just a way of boosting your own site and become real friends, you will be able to get much, much more out of that relationship.
Perhaps, join up and work on a project together? Organize an event to boost both of your businesses?
But how do you befriend someone via email and build a mutually beneficial relationship? In this article, I have prepared five networking tips for getting more guest posts, replies, and establishing connections.
You can also count on the best link building tools to help you smoothen and speed up your outreach campaign, which you definitely want to do.
Anyway, let’s jump straight into it.
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1. Never Use Templates
This one is rather a general tip, but I had to start out with it. So many bloggers use templated emails it’s ridiculous.
Now, don’t get me wrong, if you have hundreds of people to email there’s nothing wrong in structuring all of your messages in a similar kind of fashion, but if they start with “Dear Sir” or something along those lines don’t expect to ever get an answer.
It just looks like a spam bot’s work and 99% of the time the spam folder is where it will end up.
You absolutely need to personalize each of your emails for all of your prospects. It’s extremely important to show them you’re a real human, with a great attitude and a good sense of humor.
It is also extremely important to show them that you’ve invested some time into learning about them, which leads me to my next tip.
Pitchbox is a pretty neat tool that allows you to create and quickly edit templates so that they don’t look templated anymore and has tons of other awesome features that you will undoubtedly find handy during your blogger outreach.
2. Learn About Your Prospects
Now, of course, it is time-consuming to read all the content they publish. But hey, if your aim is to establish connections, you should know who you’re connecting with, right? Especially if you seek to become partners or even friends.
You don’t need to go through every single post they made, of course, but at least getting familiar with their best-performing publications is a good step towards cooperating.
Take a look at what they post on their social media, see what they like, and use that knowledge to your advantage while crafting your pitch. They will be surprised someone they’ve never met knows their favorite dish/book/movie etc.
Their About page is also a pretty good source of information like this.
3. Engage With Them Before You Send Your Pitch
People are much more eager to speak with people they are at least slightly familiar with. And there are quite a few things you can do to increase your chances of getting a response from your prospects.
The first of those things being leaving comments under their publications. If you can strike up at least the tiniest of conversations, there is a chance your prospect will recognize your name once you actually pitch them, and since you’ve been reading through their posts and commenting actively they won’t view you like a random guy/gal spamming them, but rather a reader making some sort of offer.
Subscribing to their email newsletter is a pretty great idea too since, once again, if they see your name there, your image instantly skyrockets. Not literally, but you definitely go up in your prospect’s eyes.
If you’re sharing their posts on Twitter, be sure to add the “via @username” thingy to make sure they see it.
4. Link to Their Content
I’m sure you can see where I am coming from with this. If you do someone a favor, they will be much more eager to cooperate with you in the future. A link to their site could be one of those favors.
Yes, it is a strategy. Yes, you are doing it with your own goals in mind. But will they appreciate it? Of course, they will. Who wouldn’t love to get a free link from a reputable website with a decent user base?
But a link is just an example of good favor. You could also help them out by letting them know about mistakes in their text, informing them about broken links, reviewing their products, giving them critical feedback, and so on.
Anything that provides your prospects with some sort of value will work for this purpose.
5. Be Clear About What You Want
Since we’re talking about guest posting service, all you really need to do is write a good pitch and offer your content to them. The blogger outreach about guest posting is one of the most important approaches that needs to be perfected. Don’t write them an essay and try to be as brief and to the point as possible while being clear as to who you are and what you want.
Also, if you don’t get a reply, don’t worry. They could have missed it or it could have gotten flagged as spam by mistake. Don’t be afraid to follow up but no more than once. If the second email yields no result, they are probably not very interested and you’re better off finding someone else than trying to get their attention.
