The term “content is king” might be an absolute cliché, but unfortunately it’s true.
What is also true is that content alone isn’t sufficient to gain links. In other words, you might build the best content in the world, but if nobody knows about it there is a major problem.
This is where outreach steps into the picture. In short, this revolves around contacting journalists and webmasters from other websites in a bid to get them to cover, and ultimately link, to your contact.
It’s a specialized job and while one tactic might work well one year, suddenly the landscape changes. Through this guide we will take a look at some of the best techniques to perfect your outreach strategy.
Get the contact details correct
Once upon a time, this was a breeze. One simply ventured to the website in which outreach was being initiated with, before clicking the author’s name and pinging over an email.
While said technique can work on some websites, the emergence of freelance journalists mean that this isn’t quite as fruitful anymore. Freelance journalists don’t have profiles set up on these sites, and as such aren’t easily contactable.
This is where a people search enters the equation. These sorts of websites contain the contact details for millions of people, and it’s very easy to filter out based on the parameters. Once you are good to go with this information, you can craft your email accordingly
But wait, which journalists should you be contacting?
The above is a great tip for general outreach and finding contacts, but in an ideal world you need to know exactly which journalists to contact.
This should be based all around the content that you have now created. You should try and find content along a similar topic, before then finding the journalist’s (via the first method we talked about) contact details.
By opting for this approach, you will be contacting journalists who you know are renowned for covering the topic in question. This is likely to yield much stronger results for you.
It’s a numbers game
Unfortunately, even whilst combining both approaches as above, it all comes down to a numbers game. While we don’t have any solid statistics to hand, what we know is the experience of a lot of marketing individuals who have worked in this field.
Firing off a couple of emails just doesn’t cut it in these cases. One has to remember that journalists receive countless emails (enough to overflow an inbox) every single day from content creators who are looking to get their piece published in the big outlets. As such, you have to accept that there will be occasions where your email is simply ignored – without a reply.
You also have to accept that sending over a handful of emails usually isn’t enough either. Instead, go for the masses, sending tens or hundreds at a time. If you end up securing just three links, but from the big publications, it will have been well worth such effort.
