Part IV: OUTREACH
You can have the best content on the web, but if no one ever reads it, it's useless. If you have a large, established website with an existing community or readership, it is possible that your content will be read and shared without much work from you. For the majority of websites, however, content will need to be promoted before anyone will read or share it. Content sometimes needs that push to give it the attention it deserves. This is where outreach comes in.
Why Outreach Is Important
Outreach can help give your website the exposure that it needs in order to thrive. In an ideal world, your audience would just be able to find and engage with your content naturally, and you wouldn't need any outreach. This is certainly possible; there are many products and companies that have succeeded online without having to think about outreach. However, this seems to be the exception rather than the rule, particularly as the web is becoming more competitive every day. It can also take a long time for promotion to happen naturally if you do not give your site that push it needs or dedicate time to getting the word out yourself, and instead rely only on word of mouth referrals to drive traffic and links.
You need to spend some time thinking about whom you should be promoting your content to, and how you are going to get their attention. This is the very first stage of outreach— thinking about who might care enough about your content to share it with their audience. You also need to spend time finding the right influencers for your content area, so that
you don't end up wasting your time contacting people who are not interested in what you have to say.
Once you've done this, you can work on crafting your message to influencers and think
about the best way to contact them. Email is the most common form of outreach for online content, but don't forget that phoning people can be very effective, too. Many higher-level links from magazines and newspapers will come when you pick up the phone and talk to
the right people.
In this section of the book, we have included chapters that cover crafting your message and making sure that you give yourself the best chance possible of getting a positive reply. Don't underestimate the power of a good email or thoughtful phone call; it would be a shame for your best content to be lost because of bad messaging in your outreach communications.
Good Outreach versus Bad Outreach
Good outreach can help your content spread to a large, relevant audience who will engage with it. This can lead to social shares, links, bookmarks, and, ultimately—more traffic to
your business, which is what we are all striving for.
As part of a good outreach campaign, you should make sure you're targeting people who
have the ability to send you traffic that converts into revenue. When you do this, it ensures that your work generates more than links or social shares; that is, it ensures that it will lead
to real customers.
Remember that you are contacting people in your industry who are influencers, and that you are working on behalf of your client. Bad outreach can damage more than your personal reputation. It can damage the reputation of the website you're representing, get your email blacklisted, and generally annoy a lot of people. Sometimes, bad outreach can get you results in the very short term, but it will never help you build long-term relationships that will help you succeed online.
This section of the book provides many examples of how to do good outreach, as well as some examples of what doesn't work. Keep these lessons in mind, but remember, every website owner is different. Each one will need to use a customized approach when building relationships with influencers and customers.
How Outreach Has Changed
Traditionally, many SEOs focused on volume of links rather than quality, which meant that outreach was mostly a numbers game. You could usually calculate that for every thousand emails you sent, you would get about ten links. With these numbers, you could then scale outreach in order to build more links. But when you scale anything, there is a danger that the quality will diminish. As the outreach scaled up, chances were that you would rely on a default template, rather than personalizing each email for the recipient. Many website owners are savvy enough to see through an email template, particularly if their website is a high-quality one that they care about. Still, this strategy used to work well.
However, things have changed. Emphasis on high quality links has never been greater, so
the tactics of SEOs have changed to reflect this. In order to get these high quality links, you need to focus on building relationships. In recent years, outreach has become more about building relationships and providing content that is of real value. It has moved heavily away from automated emails and more towards what we'd expect PR consultants and general marketers to do.
Outreach today is much more focused on bloggers who have a large following on social media communities such as Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest. This focus means that if your outreach is successful, you're not just getting a link to your content. You are also getting exposure to a large, established audience who is interested in your products. This aligns your goals much more with good marketing, rather than just adding up links.
Many SEOs are now also working closely with PR consultants who are able to tap into contacts they have at high-profile national media outlets. Some SEO companies have gone as far as hiring dedicated PR consultants who can get those hard-to-get links that may not be achievable via email outreach.
Essentially, this is what outreach is all about—building long-term relationships that will help you succeed and benefit others on the web. SEOs can sometimes forget that a relationship is a two-way thing. The person you're contacting needs to receive something of value in order to give you what you want.
The Dangers of Buying Links
Some website owners will only link to you or share your content if you pay them. Don't buy links. This is strictly against Google's Webmaster Guidelines, and if you get caught buying links, your website can be penalized or even banned from Google's index.
Website owners and bloggers are also much more savvy than they used to be; they are not only aware of what SEO is, but are also aware of the value of a link. Therefore, it isn't a surprise when a blogger responds and wants to be paid to share your content. Don't let yourself be tempted to go down this route; it is an easy win, but it is still buying links, and is dangerous for both you and the blogger/seller.
When you offer website owners something of value, it shouldn't be anything that can get you into trouble with Google. Instead, offer something that is valuable to the audience of the website you're contacting. For example, you could offer a great piece of content, a tool they could really use, or an interview with someone they like. This strategy will not only increase the number of links you receive, but will build interest in your content and create goodwill for your clients.
The Challenges of Outreach
Outreach is usually identified by SEOs as one of the hardest parts of their job. Some of the major challenges of outreach include scaling without being spammy, crafting content that appeals to a wide range of people, and getting the attention of large influencers who can share your content with their audience.
While the content in this section will help you overcome many of these challenges, the one thing that I would advise keeping in mind is this—invest your time and resources properly, and don't take risky shortcuts. Good outreach is an investment, and investments take time. You will read a lot about link building that make it sound very easy, and while there are some low-hanging fruits that you can harvest easily, many parts of the outreach process are tough.
Each part of the outreach process is important and there are various things you can do to optimize each one, but there is one thing that makes the entire process go much more smoothly—exceptional content.
The Importance of Exceptional Content
An often overlooked part of outreach is the “hook” or “story” that provokes the interest of the person you're contacting. This is usually backed up with a piece of content—it might be a written article, an infographic, or data visualization. Without this, every other step in the process becomes much harder. It is much easier to be successful at outreach if you have something that is of genuine interest to your target market.
Many SEOs will start doing outreach and just expect the people they contact to care enough to take the time to link to them. In reality, a blogger doesn't wake up in the morning wanting to link to every person that emails him. In particular, popular bloggers with large followings will receive many outreach emails every day. You truly need to spend time thinking about why they should care about your content.
There has been a rise in the number of SEO companies who are now investing heavily in content creation. This means that more time and money is being spent very early in the outreach process on the story that will hopefully appeal to influencers. While this is the way that SEOs should be thinking, there is a challenge here in that it increases pressure on the people doing outreach to get results. A lot of time may have been spent already on the content creation, so to fail when it comes to getting shares, links, or traffic can mean that people lose faith in the whole process.
Don't let this happen to you. Read the chapters in this section to learn how to improve your outreach efforts, and then customize an outreach strategy and put in the time required to make it successful. Create and maintain mutually beneficial relationships with influencers in your target markets. As with networking offline, focus on how you can help others when networking online. Be genuine. And keep the faith.