|
There are some important practices you must adopt when conducting your blogger outreach. Too many people fail to do the basics and the result of that is poor results and a poor outlook on outreach as a core marketing activity. I think that is a shame. At the heart of blogger outreach is making connections with other people and collaborating in a way which brings benefits to both parties. Blogger outreach needs to be done no matter what campaign you are running whether it’s a competition, an affiliate relationship or a guest post. Let’s go through 5 important blogger outreach practices for you to implement in your next campaign for better results. 1. Pin down your offer before emailing Make sure you know specifically what you are offering the blogger you are reaching out to. Don’t expect them to come up with a way they can work with you. You are emailing them because you want to work with them and think that collaborating in some way will provide benefit to you both. Notice how I say both here. Do not email a blogger with some vague opportunity just to try and land a free link from them. Be respectful, this is a person who has spent a lot of time and energy growing an established audience of followers. They are a business person as much as they are a writer, graphic designer and creative. 2. Only cold email if desperate! If you absolutely must then cold email is a method to get in touch with bloggers, the response rate is between 5 - 20% depending on your offer and how well written it is. Unless you have a way to source a huge amount of high quality leads to funnel into your cold email campaign then it might not be economical for you to do this at scale. I wouldn’t rely on cold email as a primary source of growing relationships with bloggers. 3. Follow them on twitter Twitter is still a really great networking tool. Follow the bloggers you want to reach out to on twitter and put them on a private list. Log onto this list every day and scan through, it’s amazing how much you learn about the niche you are working in just from doing this. You’ll also get to know something about the personality of the bloggers you want to connect with, as well as what they are up to at the moment and what they enjoy. If you find yourself wanting to reply to something they have tweeted feel free to do that. Entering into a natural conversation is a great way to get you on their radar. After a few twitter chats you can DM them or send them an email to take the relationship to the next level and see if they’d be interested in a collab opportunity. A really good place to start is a guest post as you both get the benefit and it is quite a low effort activity on both sides. 4. Sell your offer not yourself (first) When you do reach out to a blogger make sure in the first lines you sell your offer, not yourself. There is nothing that turns someone off more, than reading an email which starts with a brag >> Hi Cheryl I am an award-winning Entrepreneur and I won 3 prizes last year for my startup which is taking my market by storm. NO! Lead with what you are offering the blogger first Hi Cheryl I’m writing to see if you’d be interested in a guest post for your blog. I am an award-winning Entrepreneur and I won 3 prizes last year for my startup which is taking my market by storm. As you can see, you are still able to sell yourself and the value you can offer but you lead with your offer, not with your brag. Always remember your audience wants to know what they can get out of it , your brag seals the deal. 5. Be Respectful Unfortunately, I feel like I have to include this point - it is sad that this is not just a given. However, there are a lot of PR & Outreach Agencies which don’t treat bloggers with respect. I believe every one of them should be forced to try and build a blog and grow an audience themselves, and see just how much effort goes into doing it. Always be respectful in your communication and remember that there are two sides to the story. You AND the person you are speaking with. If you are looking for high-quality blogger placements we have plenty available in our store! Check them out. Or sign up for a free trial of our blogger outreach tool Guest Bloggers Wanted which helps you connect with bloggers & influencers quickly to produce PR standard guest posts.
0 Comments
GBW saves us email & relationship management headaches As a small Content Marketing Agency the most time consuming aspect of producing guest posts for clients has to be blogger outreach. Specifically, relationship management. And no matter how hard we tried we never felt like we were doing it well despite the time spent. We are good at content, not at email, relationship management & negotiating & we were stuck focusing on an area we didn’t excel in which was causing our consultant a lot of headaches! Using GBW (Guest Bloggers Wanted) meant our consultant could break down our guest post campaigns to a content level, it is then sent to a database of bloggers who pitch for content which fits their audience. We can produce PR standard guest posts for clients at a fraction of the cost using this tool & we can shift our focus onto content creative and away from relationship management. GBW gets me out of a spreadsheet & focusing on content creative High quality blogger outreach is very tough to scale and is time consuming. Not only did we have to sift through bloggers, we then had to make connections with them, figure out if there was a content fit and then negotiate and check if they fit into our campaign budget. Managing campaigns with 10 - 15 bloggers in one go for one campaign, and then managing more than one is a lot of work for one consultant and we were finding it difficult to execute and turn around the guest posts to a high level, within 30 days. We wanted to spend the most amount of time possible on producing high quality & relevant content so we wanted a tool which could help us quickly find high quality bloggers with an engaged audience. We would not have been able to scale our business and continue to take on new clients without Guest Bloggers Wanted. The outreach process takes too much time and it would have created a bottleneck in our business, and no doubt lose us some of our top clients. When bloggers pitch for content it produces a better blog fit Since using this tool we have reduced the cost of our outreach, both in time spent finding and negotiating with bloggers, and with the cost of publishing content. We have greater flexibility & can easily mix up our content strategy between guest posts or PR pieces where the blogger will write about an experience using high quality and original photos - these PR pieces always do very well and get fantastic engagement which our clients love. Our consultant is able to put up content and have bids from interested bloggers within 24 hours with no extra effort or time needed from her side. It takes roughly 10 - 15 minutes to go through the bids for each piece of content and choose which blogger is the best fit based on the the SEO tools she already has access too. When bloggers pitch for content it produces a better blog fit & reduces time spent in negotiation and following false leads. We’ve cut our people costs by 50% using GBW Since using Guest Bloggers Wanted we regularly have content in our campaigns which achieve over 50 comments. The blogger featured in our head image for example, Vivian was a connection we were able to make via GBW for an article about best spots in London to have tea. She is a Japanese fashion & lifestyle blogger with a loyal following, using traditional methods of outreach we would never have known she was about to hop on a plane to London to cover this topic! We connected with her & were able to collaborate for a very low cost because it was a great fit for the type of content she was already producing. The end result was PR quality content with very high engagement metrics & a happy client! Engagement is a core metric for us and is something our clients are very interested in seeing as it proves that real people are on the other side reading and engaging with it and have now been introduced to their product or service. It is no longer enough to deliver a guest post with good domain authority and traffic metrics - we always aim to deliver high engagement as well and Guest Bloggers Wanted helps us to do that. The time spent conducting outreach, negotiating and managing the whole process has been cut by more than 50%. *Disclaimer, Guest Bloggers Wanted is a tool which has been produced by Ginger Marketing however this Case Study accurately represents the results Ginger Marketing has achieved for their clients using it and they warmly welcome other SEO Consultants to try it out for free & see what the think! CHECK IT OUT
All it takes is a slip of the fingers to accidentally transpose a few letters, and voila, you’ve got yourself into a situation involving an egregious spelling error.
You might think the featured picture is a little bit too dramatic for this topic... well... it is no lie that this add on literally makes me feel like this girl pictured !! Every time the tool corrects my spelling of definitely I sing a little song of joy (can never get my head round that word!!). I'm sure you have words you misspell all of the time as well. Then there’s the dreaded grammatical debate. Some people follow the rules of Strunk and White and read ‘The Elements of Style’ every night before going to bed. Others believe that the internet has changed the rules of grammar forever. Neither school of thought is completely right, but both undoubtedly make grammar errors that can be avoided. You don’t need to have perfect grammar or be an expert in spelling to improve the quality of your writing. Problems Spelling and Grammar Errors Can Cause Have you ever been reading a blog post, an article, or even a book and run across a spelling error that changed the context and concept of message completely? Accidentally type ‘massage’ instead of ‘message’ and - well - you see what I mean. If you write something that is grammatically incorrect, you can also inadvertently change the meaning of the sentence, leaving readers very confused. Common Spelling Mistakes Even with auto correct you can make spelling errors if you go too quickly and fail to proofread your words. Typing out the word ‘that’ instead of ‘than’ may make a sentence unclear and clunky. If you’re talking about ‘typos’ and you write down ‘types’ instead, you’ll also cause your audience to miss the point. Spelling mistakes aren’t always errors, meaning that a word can be spelled correctly, but you accidentally typed out a closely related but misspelled word. Common Grammar Mistakes Grammar mistakes are even more common than spelling errors. From comma splices to subject-verb agreement, if your sentences aren’t typed out tightly and concisely there is likely a grammatical error present. Do you know how to use semicolons in the correct manner? How about em dashes? When you’re typing a piece that needs to adhere to Chicago style or MLA format, how do you know if you’ve followed all of the rules? Introducing Grammarly Grammarly is both a software and add-on that writers can use to check over their work for spelling and grammatical errors. In addition, Grammarly can actually make suggestions that will make your writing clearer and more succinct. If you have ever struggled to get your point across while writing a research paper or a scholarly article, Grammarly is a tool that you need to have in your arsenal. What Is Grammarly? Grammarly is a program that you can use in conjunction with word processing software, your blog, and even on the web to ensure that your writing is always on the mark. It’s a standalone tool that you can use to manually check your writing, and it is also an add-on extension that works with dozens of existing pieces of software. How you use Grammarly depends on whether you’re a professional business owner, a student, or a budding master of words.
How to Add Grammarly to Your Blog
Just download the Grammarly extension for your preferred web browser and you will be able to ensure that all of your blog posts are grammatical error free. As you type out new blog posts Grammarly will highlight all potential spelling and grammar errors, enabling you to make changes before you hit the publish button. Grammarly has been the secret tool of professional and novice bloggers alike for years. While you should always read over your writing to see if you missed any spelling or grammar errors, using tools like Grammarly will make your writing more precise. Make sure that all of your published works are polished and finely tuned. Grammarly can improve your writing as well as make spelling errors a thing of the past. Companies Using Grammarly Stan, Digital Marketing Manager at Selby's "I use the Google Chrome extension of Grammarly. Right now as I'm typing this Grammarly is behind the scenes checking every word and sentence that I typed out so I don't look bad. There was a case study done on spelling errors. Charles Duncombe, CEO of a $20 million-per-year online retail group, wondered why his online hosiery site was underperforming. He discovered a spelling mistake in a prominent line on a product page, where the word ‘Tights’ was spelt ‘Tihgts’. When the mistake was fixed conversion rates jumped 80%." Daniel, Owner of Heavenly Hammocks We use Grammarly to avoid making mistakes in emails and product descriptions. We would lose credibility if people were noticing spelling and grammar mistakes in our writing. I feel like it reduces my mistakes by about 80%, and the remaining 20% are probably when I forget to check the suggestions. Nicole, Digital Marketing Exec from Wall Sauce Wallsauce.com is an e-retailer so digital marketing is at the forefront of its strategy. The Grammarly plug-in enables me to quality control blog posts in Word, statuses created directly on social media before they’re posted and emails sent from Outlook. It gives me a great deal of confidence in my work and as one of the brand representatives of Wallsauce.com! As usual let us know in the comments below! Have you used Grammarly before or are you going to use it now? Has this tool helped improve your writing? Related Posts How To Choose A Blog Name You Won't Hate In 2 Years Avoid These Mistakes If You Want Google Traffic Two Pitfalls To Avoid When Looking For Influencers
This post was proofread by Grammarly*
* This symbol indicates an affiliate link, we only recommend products & services that we personally use ourselves & deem to be of high value.
|
AuthorWritten by Cheryl A Clarke Chief Happiness Officer & Content Marketing Freelancer @ Ginger Marketing (unless stated otherwise) Blog CategoriesPopular content marketing postsTotal Social Media Share Count
Top Udemy Courses*Archives
August 2021
|
RSS Feed
MONTHLY QUOTE
Quote Of The Month;
“Successful SEO is not about tricking Google. It’s about PARTNERING with Google to provide the best search results for Google’s users.” – Phil Frost, Main Street ROI
“Successful SEO is not about tricking Google. It’s about PARTNERING with Google to provide the best search results for Google’s users.” – Phil Frost, Main Street ROI