Introduction
In recent years, Blogger Outreach has emerged as one of the most pursued digital marketing strategies in the world. The benefits of blogger outreach make it an essential component of any brand’s or agency’s digital marketing focus.
Some of the major benefits of blogger outreach are:
- Securing high quality backlinks for your brand website
- Reaching out to new audiences in your industry niche
- Establishing networks and building credibility in an industry domain
- Driving high volumes of traffic to your brand website
- Setting high ROI Lead Generation and Sales Conversion Campaigns.
Even though most brands know of the benefits of blogger outreach, they fail to implement it in the best fashion possible. This is because most brands and agencies are always looking to secure one or the other benefits, rather than pursue it as a 360-degree strategy. Learn more about blogger outreach at Medium
In this article, we will look at the 5 most common mistakes brands and agencies make when pursuing a blogger outreach strategy.
5 Blogger Outreach Mistakes to Avoid: The List
1. Doing Blogger Outreach Manually-
In my experience, I have seen most brands trying to master blogger outreach manually or by themselves. Being a highly specialized digital marketing strategy, it is impossible for brands to invest manpower, expertise, resources, and time in pursuing such a strategy.
The key to blogger outreach is establishing relationships with many bloggers and websites over a long duration. Rather than do it manually, brands should always take help from agencies, which offer expert and specialised blogger outreach services.
This not only helps bring the costs down, but also ensures higher ROIs, effective campaign planning, and time-bound deliveries. Bloggers find working with professional outreach agencies much more convenient and easy. Agencies too can fix accountability and ensure timely delivery of assignments.
2. Focus on a Definite Industry Niche-
If you are looking to follow White Hat strategies, Google’s Quality Guidelines dictate that you pursue blogger outreach in your industry niche. Brands and agencies make the mistake of manipulating content just to save time and costs.
This is a faulty practice. The key is not just to get backlinks from any and every site. By reaching out to and establishing relationships with bloggers in your niche, you will always be able to run campaigns that are Google-friendly.
The key is never to pursue blogger outreach with a one-dimensional approach. Quality content, which is created with the purpose of winning traffic, is well-intentioned, according to Google. Securing backlinks is an added advantage. You should always reach out to and place your website’s backlinks on relevant sites. For Google, relevancy is the new page rank!
3. Try to Establish Long-Term Relationships with Bloggers-
Even when it comes to getting quality backlinks, Google is mum about whether backlinks from many websites are great, or getting backlinks from just one website is good enough. Either way, you should always attempt to establish long-term relationships with bloggers.
This will help you engage with the audience of the blogger over a sustained period. If done right, blogger outreach has great capabilities of securing hot leads and active sales. If you are setting out to pursue this, you should always set high aims. The good bloggers do not want to work with many brands at the same time.
In my experience, long-term relationships are critical as bloggers go out of their way to help you. For example, the best bloggers share your content on their social media as often as possible. They even try to include your content in their Newsletters and Email mailing lists.
4. Do not try to pursue Black Hat or Grey Hat Strategies-
Like all digital marketing strategies, blogger outreach has become plagued by black hat strategies. These strategies are ones that do not fall within Google’s quality guidelines. Link resellers and Private Blog Networks are two elements that you need to avoid at all times.
By working with industry authority bloggers, and emphasizing quality content, you will ensure that your strategies are always within Google’s quality guidelines. The best industry bloggers stay away from questionable links and resellers. They have built the credibility and reputation of their website over the years. They will never want to jeopardize it.
By following white hat strategies, you will ensure the maximum ROIs from your campaigns. You will also enjoy peace of mind, knowing Google is never going to penalise you or de-index your brand website.
5. Being Casual, Informal and Unprofessional-
The top industry bloggers try to avoid working with anybody and everybody. They only work with a couple of agencies, which offer blogger outreach services.
As a brand, you should always finalise the terms of your engagement at the very outset. This involves monetary compensation and the kind of work which is required. Do not change the terms of the agreement later on.
Once you get a bad reputation in the industry niche, no blogger would want to work with you. Brands and agencies forget that bloggers are a close-knit community. Word travels fast as to which brand or agency has defaulted on a payment, or acted unprofessionally. If you are really looking to pursue blogger outreach in a long-term fashion, be as professional and upfront as possible.
Conclusion
Even though most brands and agencies know the benefits of blogger outreach, I have seen 70% of all blogger outreach campaigns end up being unsuccessful. The major reasons for this are the five above-mentioned points.
By eliminating these mistakes, you will ensure a high ROI campaign, which will help you reap major benefits from a blogger outreach strategy.
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