I don't know about you, but as a person in the digital marketing/PR field, I wear many hats. And one of those is the blogger outreach hat.
For me, the hardest part is actually finding the bloggers to reach out to. Once I've found the bloggers in my vertical, the pitching is just like making friends a cocktail party-it comes naturally and easy when you are simply personable.
So finding bloggers. It doesn't have to take a whole week to compile a fantastic list and it doesn't have to be a frustrating and unorganized process.
Before working at GroupHigh, I did blogger outreach the "manual way" for an ecommerce company. I remember running a campaign to promote an infographic as a newbie and spent two 8 hour work days putting together a spread sheet of bloggers to email complete with their email address or link to their contact form, a note or post to reference and I looked up how many Twitter followers they had. Talk about boring and having a headache when all is said and done...
Along the way I've picked up some tricks and tips that can help cut down the most time consuming part of blogger outreach-actually finding the perfect bloggers to pitch.
Blog rolls
I am a huge fan of blog rolls. They are lists of blogs that a blogger puts together in a certain niche. I look at it as the bloggers already doing the work for me. And I consider these blogs as "pre-qualified" because a blogger isn't going to vouch for another blogger unless they mean it as it would be a poor reflection on them...
For example, for a client I needed mom bloggers who wrote about nut allergies for a nut free candy company I was promoting.
I simply Googled "nut allergy blog rolls" and instantly found two containing over 100 blogs collectivey. Gold mine.
Blogger Outreach tool
Once I joined the GroupHigh team, I obviously didn't have to do blogger outreach manually anymore. I get to eat my own dog food so to speak and for that, I'm lucky because it cuts blogger outreach time probably in more than half.
But GroupHigh isn't the only tool out there as it's not in everyone's budget. So here is a post that dissects some of the other tools out there that might be able to take your campaigns to a better and more effective level as well.
Ask bloggers to recommend friends and other bloggers in their network
Many bloggers tend to be part of a tight knit community within their verticals. Instead of competing against each other you'll find that they can be very friendly and eager to share each other's words.
With that said, a colleague of mind told me that every time he forms a new relationship with a blogger he asks the blogger for contacts that would be interested in working on the campaign, too. He said it works very very well for him. So why not give it a try?
Stick to context and good content
What if you didn't spend time qualifying your bloggers with numeric stats? Instead of finding out blog traffic, Twitter following and/or MozRank, what if you simply looked at the blog for a professional appearance and great content?
Search for blogs in your niche instead of entire genre. For example, one of my active wear clients reaches out to fashion bloggers who have an affinity for writing about active wear not just fashion in general. They also reach out to health blogs who recommend brands that they like for exercise not nutrition blogs in general. Get the drift?
Do you have any tips to offer on saving time finding bloggers to work with? Please share in the comments below in honor of collaboration!
image: find bloggers/shutterstock