SMALL BUSINESS BLOGGER OUTREACH STRATEGY

Small business blogger outreach strategy is one of the google age marketing activities that every modern small business must proactively engage in if they are to be ahead of the ever intense small business competition.

In this post, I will be giving you some useful tips that can yield results that you never would have imagined as far as promoting your firm online is concerned.

But before I go on giving tips on small business blogger outreach strategy, I would like to spend some time providing a simple explanation of what a blogger outreach is and highlight the importance of having a small business blogger outreach strategy.

What is a small business blogger outreach?

A small business blogger outreach is a phrase used to describe the activities of entrepreneurs that is designed to build a lasting trust and relationship with owners of popular blogs that will yield lasting dividend.

Some people prefer to call blogger outreach ‘guest blogging’ but I think that this is a very narrow way of explaining what blogger outreach is. Unlike guest blogging which simply try to attract attention, a blogger outreach is a process with unlimited potentials.

Why Small Business Must Be Reaching Out To Bloggers

There are various reasons why start-up businesses engage in blogger outreach. The main and ultimate aim is to take your goods and services to the doorstep of buyers.

The added advantage that comes from a well-planned and executed blogger outreach is that it also creates backlinks from the blogs that you have built good reputation with.

Research has shown that experts now prefer to share their expertise through weblog and that the internet audience have come to trust what the experts are saying through their blogs. I can hardly think of any trendy professional that does not have one form of blog or the other.

So if you are a small business owner and you are not reaching out to influencers in your area of interest then you are missing out of this exciting online marketing strategy that is almost guaranteed to bring positive result.

But, the good news is that you can start today by following these simple and inexpensive small business blogger outreach strategy.

Small Business Blogger Outreach Strategy Steps

1. The starting point of any small business blogger outreach strategy is to identify the keywords used by your current and potential customers and clients in their daily online activities.

There are free keyword research tools like google keyword tool, ubersuggest or keywordtool.io to assist with your keyword research process. This article will not go into details on how to use them but they are dead easy to use.

2. Once you have identified the keywords that your potential clients and customers are using to find the product or service you have to offer, the next thing to do is to do a simple online search using google, bing or any search engine of your choice.
3. Make a list of blogs that rank high on all keywords that can be used to find your product or services. I recommend taking note of the 1^st to 20^th blogs on each of the keywords that are closely aligned to your area of interest.
4. The next stage is to make contact with the blog owners. I know this may sound very simple and obvious but this where a lot of outreach amateurs get it all wrong. Every other thing you have done will be for nothing if this bit is approached the wrong way. The rest of this article will be used to share my experience on the things that have worked for me in the past and are still working.

8 Golden Rules of Outreach Campaign

1. Never spam bloggers with same email.
2. Never include any link in the initial email that you send to the blog owner.
3. Address the bloggers by their name.
4. Don’t try and sell any idea.
5. Make sure you introduce yourself.
6. Explain how you found their blog.
7. Highlight the benefits to the blogger.
8. Make the email brief but meaningful.
9. Provide them with unique high quality material if they agree to post your material.
10. Pay them if they ask for it as what bloggers usually charge is cheap compared to other forms of advertising and marketing tools.

Notice that the above discussed tips are all free tools and strategies for promoting and successfully managing your small business. In this last section, I would briefly mention some paid tools that you can use to achieve same result as using free and manual processes.

Inkybee, streambuzz and grouphigh are some of the tools that you can use to help automate your marketing efforts, the only downside to using these blogger outreach and marketing tools is the cost involved.

Market samurai is another paid for tool that you can use to execute some of your online small business blogger outreach strategy.

Final Word

Use the free tools and strategies as much as you can. Only use the paid ones if you must and seek professional advice before doing so. You may for example hire an accountant to help analyse the numbers for you.