Outreach Marketing for a More Successful Blog
Sarah
If someone told you that you need to engage in outreach marketing for your blog, your response might be that the reason you created your blog was to market your business.
On the other hand, your blog might simply be a fun way to connect with other like-minded individuals. In that case, spending money on marketing could be beyond your financial means.
But regardless of the “why” behind your blog, you should know how outreach marketing can help you accomplish your readership goals and generate meaningful traffic.
Whether you’re running a business or keeping a blog for personal fulfillment, you created it with the goal of sharing your thoughts on a particular subject. And while you want to broaden your audience, you also want to conserve time and money in the outreach marketing process.
If you want to make the most of your outreach marketing efforts without breaking the bank or logging 40-hour weeks, here is how you do it:
Find Your Niche
Before you can really start promoting your blog, you need to have something to say. Your blog provides you with a platform, but you need a niche that sets you apart from the millions of other bloggers seeking to gain an audience.
You likely have a general topic already in mind, and if you’re a decent writer, you’ve developed your voice (i.e., writing personality). What you need now is a platform with an audience, which means finding ways to take advantage of the readership base that similar blogs have cultivated so that you can also capture their attention.
Pinpoint Your Target Audience
In addition to honing your message or niche, you should spend some time considering who falls into your target audience.
Suppose your blog discusses health and beauty products. There are thousands of blogs doing the same, and many of them probably do it better than you. But you could develop a niche focusing on products and procedures for teens or seniors, for example. You’ll have a built-in audience at the ready who might feel overlooked by other bloggers.
Until you know who you’re marketing to, your efforts may amount to very little. Instead of wasting time on blanket marketing to a broad and ill-defined group, narrow your focus and you’ll accomplish a lot more.
Research Guest Post Opportunities
This is where the real work begins. You’ve got your niche locked down and you’ve focused on a target audience. Now it’s time to find the proper platforms from which to start your outreach marketing efforts.
One of the best ways to begin is by guest posting on related industry blogs. However, guest posting can be a delicate balancing act.
On the one hand, you want to find blogs with the most readers, increasing your opportunities for relevant connections. But you’ll find that exceedingly popular blogs don’t need your free content.
After all, they have paid staff writers with their own developed voices and followings. Additionally, they are already inundated with requests from guest bloggers like yourself, many of whom bring their own small audiences to the table.
In other words, you need to find guest posting opportunities with blogs that have a lot of readers — but not so many that they’re swimming in a sea of guest post requests.
Identifying the right guest posting opportunity will take some work, but it is also an extremely efficient way of expanding your reach. Don’t get discouraged if your first few guest post requests go unanswered. Stick with it; eventually, you will find the perfect partner for your blog.
Make Content Valuable
Top-notch content is the order of the day. Naturally, you need strong writing and editing skills in order to produce error-free content — the highly ranked blogs you are targeting for guest-posting opportunities won’t take work that is consistently filled with typos and misspellings.
But you also need to offer the audience value with your content. This means creating posts that are not only relevant, timely, and informative but also fun, engaging, and attention-grabbing.
If you feel like you’re spinning your wheels, consider working with an SEO agency. Such a partner can provide you with some top-notch blog content that will help you deliver value to your audiences. Since you are paying for the content, you’ll retain all rights to it and can promote it as your own.
Make Content Shareable
The long and short of the outreach marketing game is organic sharing, and it begins with creating content that is easy to share — and that readers will want to share.
Full blog posts are fine, but you might also consider creating other content, like infographics that offer one-click sharing (and contain embedded links), as well as video content, just for a few examples.
This type of content will appeal to a time-conscious audience, and any blogs you plan to guest post with will also appreciate the shareability they provide (as the host blog’s name will also be spread in the process).
Encourage Online Community Members
You rely on your readers to be your brand ambassadors and share your content with their networks. But you can give them the opportunity to do more on your behalf.
As you build your online community of readers and followers, you’ll notice that certain people stand out by sharing, commenting, and contributing more to the ongoing conversation.
It’s not a bad idea to promote these followers. If they have ideas to share, listen to them and encourage them to continue voicing their opinions. Putting your star followers in the spotlight will not only elevate the level of interaction with your brand but will also embolden outspoken community members to bring more followers into the fold.
Don’t Rest on Your Laurels
You’re playing the long game when it comes to building and maintaining readership for your blog. This means you can ill afford to engage in outreach marketing for a while and then stop. Like any type of marketing, your efforts must be ongoing if you want to multiply your successes.
These days, online followers are a finicky bunch — and they can afford to be with such a wealth of content to choose from. If you want to encourage growth and maintain patronage, you must nurture relationships, expand your brand, and stay abreast of emerging trends so that you can make the most of your outreach marketing efforts.
Let Our SEO Agency Fuel Your Outreach Marketing Campaign
Great content lays the foundation for a successful outreach marketing campaign, or any effective brand-building campaign, for that matter.
However, unless you moonlight as an award-winning copywriter, crafting quality blogs and other content could be more than you’re ready to take on. Why not let our professional content writing service create the content for you so your business can start racking up the leads?
Write Collective’s team includes writers from every niche. Whether you manufacture specialized hardware or manage a local business, we can match you with a talented wordsmith who will help you get noticed.
Order your content marketing package and let us get to work on your captivating copy.