Every newbie on the internet learns one Truth pretty quick: When ‘Blogging’ is the activity’s name, audience outreach #1 in the game! Any relevant blogger who has become internet-famous or is currently riding the waves of online publicity covets the value of blogging outreach, for that is the very reason behind their publicity and acclaim online.
The internet has radically changed the way global audiences interact with media. The coming of the internet forced all traditional media sectors and industries to reorient and re-frame how they ensure audiences interact or engage with their media. At the end of the day, the principal motive of content creators once they publish some content, whether textual, audio/visual or all three at once; is to ensure that their media reaches as many viewers or readers or as wide an audience pool as possible, in order to maximize their global outreach, visibility and publicity. This is true regardless of whether their platform is offline or online.
Today, it is vital to recognize that the online platform is the ultimate stage or podium which content creators can give to themselves in context to reaching out to and engaging diverse or broad audience pools all across the globe. But there are millions of content creators on the internet today, with thousands of amateur or newcomers entering the fray every day. Search engine ranking algorithms and basic search engine optimization techniques notwithstanding, it is not ridiculously hard or difficult to borrow ideas or ‘get inspired’ by publicly acclaimed and furiously followed content creators on the internet and coming up with a surprisingly good content that is unique, smart, doesn’t plagiarize any other content on the web and yet features some of the best aspects of content presentation that is always more likely to engage more audiences and engage them for longer periods. But despite what appears as great online visibility on the surface, it doesn’t always translate to robust online traffic or audience outreach and engagement.
Contrary to old-fashioned, amateurish beliefs that simply ranking high on SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages) is enough to maximize web outreach among global audiences for content posted on a blog or website; that is certainly not the case. To be fairly honest, if you’re wondering whether your blog or website content can rank remarkably high on SERPs; then here’s the answer: If you’re one of the most easily recognized, publicly acclaimed and closely followed bloggers within your niche area of topics, interests, practices, industries, services, technologies or academics, whose content consistently engages readers all across the internet, gets many comments, up-votes/likes/hearts, or whose content is promptly shared and re-shared across all the relevant social media platforms on the internet by their loyal followers, then yes, as a highly acclaimed and distinguished blogger on the internet, it is fairly reasonable to assume that your blogs will rank really high on SERPs. On the contrary, if you’re not an internet-famous blogger who is followed by thousands of active followers on various platforms, then your content won’t make it to the top of SERPs. Well, that means your content is not reshared and/or reposted to different platforms by some of the most authoritative bloggers on the internet, which further adds more visibility and increases page traffic engagement, generates new audiences and possibly new business leads for any business or promotional blog.
Why Is Blogger Outreach So Important to My Content’s Online Visibility & Traffic Engagement?
Blogger Outreach refers to the global traffic reach and audience engagement that is directed from a shared, posted or pinned link by a popular or highly acclaimed and closely followed blogger or journalist to any individual’s website or web-page where they have published their content.
For example, consider a scenario where you may have very recently written a well-studied and quite resourceful blog on stock market investments, but being an amateur or novice blogger, you don’t have a sufficiently large base of followers on social media platforms or any other means to ensure that large audience pools can have access to your posts. So to satisfy your desire to make your content viral, you track down and reach out to a couple of highly acclaimed journalists who regularly publish content for media companies like the Wall Street Journal or Reuters or two of the most largely followed finance and economics bloggers whose content regularly get published on e-news publications of Financial Times or Bloomberg Quint.
You locate their personal mail addresses and write a mail to each requesting them to take a look at your recent blog which you believe deserves to be a topic of discussion and debate on various social media and news media platforms. You politely mention that if they agree your content is truly worth some debate or at least public attention, then it would be really kind of them to share a link to your content on their own personal blog, their social media handles as well as any other media platform on the internet. Eventually, one of those people, for instance, the journalist who regularly publishes content on Reuters, answer you back saying your content has great potential to become viral and consequently shares a link to it on their own personal blog and their Twitter page.
Within hours, you find there is a steady rise in the number of unique visitors to your page, on top of a highly rewarding comment thread getting bigger with more visitors leaving opinions, thoughts, and what becomes highly entertaining as well as immersive for you as they engage in comment battles and debates with others. Overnight you can see the difference that successful blogger outreach can make to your blog’s ability to attract unique visitors consistently, and convince them to interact with your content as well as with other visitors on your page to ultimately improve the page’s traffic engagement stats. The reason why referrals, link shares/re-shares, embedded links and posts by some of the most popular, hyped, followed and acclaimed bloggers or journalists always benefit you, is the authoritativeness and command of such bloggers or journalists over particular topics/subjects/interests/practices on the internet, which make them some of the most hyped content creators instantly recognized by people who follow those topics or interests on the internet. This translates to them being a popular columnist-cum-blogger in a top global e-newspaper followed by millions of people, many of whom take to following the blogger on their social media handles as well as their personal blog or website. This, in turn, drives massive amounts of web traffic to their pages and begins a domino effect where mutual friends of people who follow that blogger also start following their social media, and then multiple friends of theirs jump onto the same hype-train, so that at the end of the day the blogger can see an exponential growth to their online follower-ship and their ability to engage web traffic with content.
It becomes pretty clear just how much web traffic could be potentially directed to one’s own website from link shares and embeds by a prominent blogger on the internet; from about 5 minutes of browsing through posts, discussion or Q&A threads on various trending topics in any top social media or news media platform. By this point whatever doubts remain in your mind regarding blogger outreach and its potential to drive ridiculously healthy amounts of web traffic to your website as well as ensuring increased visitor engagement, are simply down to your lack of awareness until this point. The good thing is like you, every day there are thousands out there discovering the incredible potential of blogger outreach for the first time and they all follow through with the same approach once they realize what sort of potential lies around the corner, just waiting to be tapped into.
And just like all those thousands of amateur bloggers who begin to approach industry pro’s requesting for a link-share on their social media handles or websites; you too should make an attempt by mailing a popular blogger and request them to share or embed your blog or content to their page for more traffic. The thing is, despite being a popular or acclaimed blogger, internet-famous content creators hardly ever turn down the option to post a particularly engaging piece of content published by another blogger, since that not only gives the chance to direct some more unique visitors to their page but also because an engaging post on their website initially directs all the traffic to their page, or in other words more than 90% of all the unique visitors that are directed to your webpage from the link to your blog come via the page of the popular blogger who shared your link so that their webpage engage 9 out of every 10 visitors to the page where the blog was originally published.
How Do Amateur Bloggers Approach The Pros To Get Their Content Shared?
Are you into shooter games on PC like most us people from the ’90s? Do you play video games at all? Well, we’re not kidding you – PC shooter games have quite the metaphoric relation to what we’re about to discuss. So the thing is, generally speaking, people broadly identify two basic methods that are predominantly utilized by amateur content creators to benefit blogger outreach. And the names for both these methods are references to how players in video games operate two different types of weapons with a distinctly different approach to the game, as well as looking for entirely different end-results with either case. These are:
- The Shotgun Method
- The Sniper Method
The Shotgun Method
This method of approaching popular bloggers or journos directly through the mail is based on the logic of using a shotgun that shoots multiple bullets in different directions in one shot to take down multiple enemies. The idea, therefore, applies to approach a massive number of highly acclaimed and popular bloggers or journos in bulk or in huge chunks. People who go for this method usually write a common letter which they then forward to the personal or business mail of popular bloggers they tracked down in bulks. This method relies on the logic that if you can reach out to a huge number of pro bloggers or journos at once, that automatically raises your chances of realistically getting a reply from more professional bloggers than the other alternative.
The Sniper Method
“The Sniper Method” is quite obviously, based on the idea of using a sniper rifle to take down far away targets with precision. And that simply means when you implement this method, you create a highly curated and narrowed down ‘hit list’ of some of the most highly sought-after and feverishly followed professional bloggers, all of whom you reach through their mail; and most importantly, you take time to carefully write separate emails individually for each of these people before sending the mail. This method relies on the rationale that places quality over quantity, meaning even a single link share to any one of these pro bloggers’ pages could be incredibly beneficial to your blog content’s potential to become viral across social media and news media platforms.
How Do Amateur Bloggers Convince the Pros to Get Their Content Shared?
Now that you know you want your next article or blog to be shared by a popular and well-recognized blogger on their website or social media pages, it’s time to get down to the real hard work. And that brings you first to good old ‘content quality’. It’s really important that the quality of your content, as well as its presentation, is good enough to impress a pro blogger or journo. If you’re not sure if your blog is authoritative enough or fails to naturally inspires debate among readers, then it’s honestly pointless to mail and request them to share your content in the first place. The next part involves carefully scouring the internet to locate a selection of highly acclaimed and instantly recognizable journalists or bloggers and then making sure their business or personal contact info and mail are correctly noted. By this time, it is quite easy to recognize that the realistic way to convince journos and pro bloggers to share your content is to adopt the sniper method very carefully.
The next step explains why the sniper method works better, and that is the personal effort made to write a mail to reach out to them. Bulk mails are all the same, even if there are millions of them, they all carry the same text. This is an instant turn-off for journalists and pro bloggers who always seek quality and uniqueness in any content, whether visual or textual. So it is really important to keep in mind that a carefully written mail, with a few personal touches or maybe a compliment or two lettings them know how much you enjoy reading, sharing and engaging with their content as well. The point is, pro bloggers and journos want to know that your content is unique, authoritative, is naturally able to inspire debate, while also ensuring not to reply to monotonous and crappy mail that doesn’t so much as even attempt to connect to them on a personal level.
So now that you are armed with many more ideas and tools to finally get your next blog the ideal blogger outreach, it’s time to ‘hit the tracks’ as they say and begin your campaign today. As a great way to make this blog more meaningful and resourceful with time, we invite all readers who try either methods of reaching out to pro bloggers to return and share their experiences, observations, and results – whether failures or successes, on the comment thread below!
Author: S N Chatterjee
Founder and Author of BDN Groups. He can help you create a highly-effective online presence & conversion rate optimization.