What Is Blogger Outreach & How Do I Do It?

Social media marketing has evolved substantially since it first became mainstream. As social media has achieved a critical mass, a lot of what was done before — such as broadcasting the same message to your entire audience — has become less effective. Now more than ever, your social media marketing strategy should focus on building on relationships.

While some marketers have pursued social media marketing for the ego boost (aka how many “friends” or “followers” your brand has), the traffic boost (which doesn’t necessarily convert), and whatever else, I have always recommended marketers focus on social media marketing as a means to build your authority and possibly your search engine rankings.

The fundamental idea that “social influence affects the links to your website” has never changed. Links are the currency of the web. The only thing that has changed is the landscape that surrounds this social influence.

Pre-2010 or so, you’d get emails requesting to exchange links with some other site that was “similar” in nature to yours. Those emails continued as slower-to-adopt-the-latest-trends agencies would continue sending emails to webmasters with the assumption that this tactic still works.

It doesn’t.

(And yet, I still receive those emails, though not in the same volume I did in the past.)
The Rise Of Blogging And Social Media

As social media took the world by storm, many things changed. Link exchanges fell by the wayside, and these shills who used to send out mass link exchange emails without any targeting in mind became “social media experts” instead.

Many would shift their focus to buying fans and followers and creating underground groups where people would beg others to tweet or vote upon their content for visibility purposes because “maybe someone will link to me.” Over time, that, too, became less practical, because networks figured out the same people were often scratching each other’s backs, and search engines weren’t that stupid, either.

Social media marketing is not truly dead, but social influence must be diversified if you’re to be successful. That means not getting the same three people to retweet your content, and not getting the same 10 people to Like your post time and time again.

Fortunately, if you follow my advice, you’ll break free of this approach and adopt a single tactic that works for variety of businesses and products — but in a different way for each one. Bonus: This tactic, in addition to being diverse and varied, isn’t yet outdated.

So what is it? How do I get visibility for a product or service?
Blogger Outreach Campaigns

Enter influencer marketing, or blogger outreach campaigns. The idea behind a blogger outreach campaign is that a company, in seeking exposure for a product or service, leverages influencers who have established a substantial following, asking them to write about it in exchange for free access to the product or service. (Sometimes, money would need to exchange hands as well. It all depends on the relationship the company has with the blogger and what the blogger commands.)

Why does this type of influencer marketing make sense?

For one thing, there are very few bloggers or influencers out there who will rip apart your product/service when receiving it for free. Sure, most disclaimers say, “I was furnished with free product, but all opinions are my own,” but think about it: How many influencers will really burn a bridge that was just established?

In truth, having been a recipient of many free products in the past decade, I can tell you this: I’ve ended up reviewing a lot of things I wouldn’t have otherwise considered even talking about. And my reviews have been either neutral or overwhelmingly positive — I haven’t had the need to write anything negative about anything, because the products don’t suck.

Something to consider, however, is that Google may look at the outright exchange of dollars (or product, or anything of value) for links as a link scheme. So requiring these folks to include a non-nofollow link could be considered shady, but the exposure you gain through these relationships could still result in additional natural links.

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