Expert’s Guide to Content Marketing Outreach
Now that you’ve written your first blog post, you’re all pumped up about sharing it with the world. You upload it to WordPress & hit publish, waiting for the traffic to start rolling in. Any minute now…
Except, it doesn’t. The only traffic you end up seeing is the handful of Facebook friends who stumbled upon your share on their feeds. Which, unless they’re semi-famous, doesn’t help too much with establishing your new blog as an authority.
The takeaway here is that even if you’re the most knowledgeable in your field or industry, traffic and recognition won’t just find you out of nowhere. You’ll have to actively seek it out – and one of the best ways to do that is through promotional outreach.
Getting the Audience & Angle Right
Outreach isn’t all that easy, though. You can’t just email the CEO of Google and ask them to share your article. To get this right, you’ll need to first find the right audience, and then get your outreach angle right (think, making it as least spammy as possible).
The audience part can be quite simple – there are 4 different internet fame-levels, each responding differently to outreach email…
- Celebrity – Anyone with a huge following. Think, Tim Ferris, Gary Vaynerchuk, etc. A single shoutout from them can lead to hundreds of qualified leads for you. The downside is, though, that they’re busy. The only chance you have to get in touch with them is by doing something creative & tailored to their interests. While this may be hard, it’s by no means impossible.
- Influencer – Professionals with a lot of followers, but not nearly as much as a celebrity. They’re significantly easier to get in touch with, given that you get the email angle right.
- Micro Influencer – The sweet spot. They have enough of a following to make your outreach efforts count, but not famous enough for them to just outright ignore you.
- Newbie – Someone who’s just starting out. Good news – they’ll be more than glad to share your content. Bad news – they don’t have much of a following, so you’re not going to see a lot of traffic or leads coming your way.
To get the best results out of content marketing outreach, you’d want to target Influencers and Micro-Influencers, specifically. Celebrities tend to be very hard to get in touch with, and require campaigns tailored to them. Newbies, on the other hand, don’t have enough of a following to make it count.
So now that you’ve got a good idea of who you’re targeting, you need to pick the outreach angle.
Imagine you’re having a really busy day. You’ve closed 2 new clients and made some major headway in finishing a long-term project. During your off-time, you get an email from some stranger on the internet, asking you to read and share their article. Would you? Probably not – you’d be wondering where they even got your email in the first place.
Unless, of course, the article in question has something to do with your interests, or stands to benefit you in some way. The same applies to influencers – write something interesting, and you’re bound to get their attention. There are 2 ways to do that…
EXPERT TIP
In addition to the 4 audience types we’ve mentioned, there’s also journalists. Working with them is a lot different, something we’ll cover in a later article.
ARTICLE RELEVANCE
It goes without saying, the article you’re sharing should have something to do with the influencer. You can’t email someone with a dog food blog & ask them to share your article on HR (well, you could, but it wouldn’t work).
So, you’d want to find someone who’s written something about the same topic as you. This means that they might be interested in what you have to say, as long as you’re saying something unique.
So, look for similar articles on Google, give them a quick read & see what they have to say. Compare it to your article – is there anything new you’re adding, somethi