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.

It’s always recommended for marketers focus on social media marketing as a means to build your authority and possibly your search engine rankings. 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).

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

You’d get emails requesting to exchange links with some other site that was “similar” in nature to yours in pre 2010 or so. 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

Many things changed as social media took the world by storm. 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 influence must be diversified if you’re to be successful as social media marketing is not truly dead. 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, you’ll break free of this approach and adopt a single tactic that works for a variety of businesses and products if you follow the steps below but in a different way for each one. Bonus: This tactic, in addition to being diverse and varied, isn’t yet outdated

Step 2 Segment your prospects

Good outreach relies on not treating everyone the same.

That’s why you should divide your list of prospects into groups according to their level of “influence.”

Here’s are the four groups that the Ahref’s CMO, Tim Soulo recommends—which generally work very well:

1. Sharks

These are the people with a huge audience and notable achievements. 

In the marketing and entrepreneurial space, this would be people like:

• Gary Vaynerchuk

• Tim Ferriss

• Guy Kawasaki

• Seth Godin

How to get on their radar

Your only chance to reach them is by a personal introduction or by doing something really creative and outstanding since these people don’t have time to read emails from strangers.

Should you reach out to them? 

No. It might seem enticing to pursue these prospects, but it’ll be too tough to get their attention.

2. Big Fish

These people are not as famous as the Sharks, but their audience is big enough to make an impact on your own business. 

In marketing, Big Fish might be:

• Brian Dean

• Noah Kagan

• Glen Allsopp

• Robbie Richards

• Matthew Woodward

There’s a good chance to reach them with a nice personal email, but never with a generic template.

You will get much more value by asking them to critique your work or validate your ideas rather than asking Big Fish for tweets and links which is unproductive (and silly).

If what you’re doing is worth their attention, they will tweet and link to it anyway.

Should you reach out to them? 

Yes. A link or tweet from these people can have a lot of value to your business.

3. Small fish

Usually, their websites are only just starting to get traction and they are actively promoting themselves by contributing to niche communities, writing guest posts and participating in all sorts of events because these people don’t have a big audience yet.

How to get on their radar

These people usually respond to personalized, respectful, and value-adding outreach emails, even if they’re loosely template-based.

Should you reach out to them? 

Yes. While a link or tweet from one of these people won’t bring as much value to your business as one from a Big fish, they’re usually more eager to build relationships.

4. Spawn

They are just starting out in your industry and have yet to build a substantial audience.

How to get on their radar

These people will often reply to your outreach emails even if they’re 100% templated. 

Should you reach out to them? 

No. As harsh as it sounds, a link or tweet from these people won’t offer much in the way of value.

So, how do we segment the list of prospects we have as now we know who we should and shouldn’t reach out to.

Let’s start by filtering out the people we don’t want to contact: Sharks and Spawn.

There’s no totally foolproof way of doing this, but I’ve found that filtering by Domain Rating (DR) is the best way to do it at scale.

the resulting CSV should have this metric for all the sites if you used Content Explorer (or the Ahrefs SEO toolbar + Google) to find and extract your initial list of prospects.

To filter out the Spawn, delete prospects with a DR lower than 20. 

To filter out the Sharks, delete prospects with a DR higher than 80.

SIDENOTE. These numbers aren’t set in stone, so feel free to play around with them. If you don’t have so many prospects, you may want to be less restrictive with that lower DR filter.

From here, you should be left only with Big Fish and Small Fish.

To segment this resulting list, you can once again filter by DR.

I would class prospects with a DR equal to or above 50 as Big Fish, and those with a DR lower than 50 as Small Fish as a general rule of thumb.

IMPORTANT! This is not an exact science. It’s up to you to choose how to segment your prospects.

It pays to spend more time and effort reaching out to BIG FISH rather than SMALL FISH because the reason for doing this is because Big Fish are more valuable than Small fish.

Step #3: Find the right contact details

Let’s face it: this is the real bottleneck when it comes to doing blogger outreach at scale.

Finding email addresses is tedious, time-consuming, and actually surprisingly tricky to automate—at least if you care about finding the right contact details.

Lots of people rely on some automated tools to scrape (or sometimes even guess) their outreach prospects’ email addresses instead of investing a bit of time to research each person and find their actual email.

Ahref already has a comprehensive guide showing eight ways to email addresses. I’m actually not going to go into much more detail in this post.
But what I am going to share is a nifty “hack” to speed up this process.

The Hunter “Hack”

Hunter.io is a popular automated tool for finding the email addresses associated with a website. 

For example, if you install their Chrome extension and hit it while browsing ahrefs.com, it’ll kick back the email addresses of a few people you might recognize.

That’s cool, but there’s a problem:

You often end up with a list of many people’s email addresses but have no clue to whom you should reach out. 

The problem here is a flawed methodology.

Start with a name and website, then find that specific person’s email address. This is why you shouldn’t start with a website but instead find the emails associated with it, then try to guess the best one.

Hunter has a tool for this:

You can upload a list of names and websites and Hunter will try to find each person’s email address because they have a bulk version of this tool.

So now only one question remains: how do you find a list of names and websites?

You may have noticed that we show author names for some of the results if your list of prospects came from Content Explorer:

These appear in CSV exports too.

The only thing that’s missing is the raw domain. But you can pull that easily with this formula in Google Sheets: =REGEXEXTRACT(C2,"^(?:https?:\/\/)?(?:[^@\n]+@)?(?:www\.)?([^:\/\n]+)")

You can then filter the spreadsheet only for URLs with author names, and upload to Hunter’s bulk email finder tool.

SIDENOTE. If your prospects didn’t come from Content Explorer, but rather Site Explorer or Google, then you can do something similar by running the pages through URL Profiler.

Of course, Hunter is never going to find emails for all the prospects, but it’s an excellent way to get a headstart.

IMPORTANT

Always verify your emails before starting an outreach campaign. 

If you fail to do this, bounces may affect the deliverability rate of your campaign.

There are lots of tools out there for verifying emails, but Neverbounce and Zerobounce are the two I’ve seen the most success with.

Step #4. Craft your pitch

This is the point at which most outreach guides tell you to come up with a template for your campaign that looks something like this:

Hey %First_Name%,

I just came across your article: %URL_of_their_article%

Great stuff!

I noticed that you linked to this post: %URL_where_they_link_to%

It’s a great post, but I wrote an even better article on that same topic.

Check it out here: %URL_of_my_article%

I hope you can add a link to my post in your article or at least tweet it.

Thanks!

Now there’s nothing wrong with templates. You need them to succeed if you want to scale your outreach.

But the problem with starting with a templated approach is obvious:

You end up with something that looks and feels like a template… because it is.

So, for now, throw away your templates and instead, focus on crafting a winning pitch to just ONE person.

Here are some tips for doing that, a few of which come from this post: 

1. Evoke curiosity with your subject line

Nobody is going to open your email, let alone read what you have to say or link to you if you get your subject line wrong.

That’s probably why there are so many people searching for “best email subject lines” every month on the internet.

If you’re one of those people, please stop. Most of the advice in articles about “best subject lines” is total garbage.

The reason is nobody stands out when everyone ends up using the same subject lines.

Instead, you should try to write a subject line that describes the reason for your email and evokes curiosity.

Example:

Subject: Blogger outreach (5‑step process)

Moreover, the email will get truncated in most email clients if the subject lines are long and sleazy. This is why you should also aim to keep your subject lines as short and sweet as possible.

And whatever you do, try to avoid sounding sleazy, sales-ey and robotic. 

Subject: Josh, Compliment On One Of Your Posts!

Subject: You’ve GOT to see this!

Subject: backlink request

Just pretend it's a regular email to a work colleague if you’re struggling.

Why a colleague and not a friend? Because unfortunately, “lol” isn’t going to cut it as a subject line.

2. Show them you know them

Your response rate will go through the roof if you take the time to learn a little more about the person to whom you’re reaching out.

I recommended showing the recipient that you know them in the first couple of lines of your email. Why? Because this part shows up before opening in most email clients…

3. Avoid fake flattery

Below are the example of empty compliment:

“Hey, I just read your article about %topic%. Great stuff!”

Empty compliments like this are in nearly all outreach emails, and there’s just no need for them.

I mean, do you really think you’re fooling anyone with such a vague and clearly untrue statement? I doubt it. 

Either say something meaningful or don’t say anything at all.

Here are some good examples that you can take a look when you are doing blogger outreach:

I love what you said about XXX. I’m totally going to implement it this month.

Your story of XXX is totally inspiring. I’ve just shared it with a couple of my friends.

Still sounds pretty generic? That’s because you need to fill in the “XXX” part with something personable and real. 

Here’s an example of the email that Ahref sent a couple of years ago with a 100% genuine compliment:

4. Explain why you’re contacting them

Here are the three most common outreach excuses: 

You tweeted this post, and I wrote a similar one…

You published this post, and I wrote a similar one…

You linked to this post, and I wrote a similar one…

Ahrefs head of marketing Tim Soulo said this:

Why would anyone want to check out a post that’s similar to what they just read? “Similar article” is a very poor excuse, as it shows you didn’t study the person you’re reaching out to.

I couldn’t agree more. So here’s what a decent reason might look like: 

… I saw that you tweeted XXX the other day, so I thought you might appreciate reading a different opinion on that topic…

… I saw that you wrote this post but didn’t mention anything about XXX, which is an important topic I talk about in my post…

… I noticed you linked to this article when talking about XXX, but that’s actually no longer true. My post is more up-to-date…

You have to research your prospects, skim their content, and come up with a genuine reason that might actually resonate with them as most people don’t say these kinds of things in their outreach emails because it takes more time.

Sounds like a lot of work, right?

To be honest, it’s not because there’s a trick you can use to make this process faster if you’re reaching out to people who linked to articles on the same topic.

It’s called: prospect bucketing.

Here’s how it works:

You group prospects into “buckets” based on the reason they linked to that similar article instead of coming up with a 100% unique outreach excuse for every one of your prospects.

Let me explain with an example.

Say that we want to promote our guide to long-tail keywords by reaching out to those who link to a similar guide. It only takes a bit of skimming to see that quite a few of those people are linking to the guide for the same reason if we throw the URL of that competing guide into Ahrefs Site Explorer, then check the Backlinks report:

Basically, the article those people are linking to defines long-tail keywords as those that consist of three or more words.

So, we could group anyone linking for that reason into one bucket, and reach out to each of them with with something like this:

I’m reaching out because I saw you mentioned “long-tail keywords” in your post about {post topic}, where you describe them as keywords consisting of three words or more.

Here at Ahrefs, we believe that this definition of the term “long tail keywords” needs revisiting for 2019, as well as the actual strategy of getting traffic from them. So we wrote an article explaining our thoughts. (Hint: It’s more about search volume than the number of words).

Here’s the link: https://ahrefs.com/blog/long-tail-keywords/

Hopefully, you agree that this is a much more compelling “why” than “… I wrote a similar article.”

5. End with a clear call-to-action

No, this doesn’t mean ending your outreach emails with something like this:

Can you please add my link to your article?

Is there any way I can get a link?

There are times when asking for a link in your first email makes sense. But most of the time, it’s not appropriate. It’s kind of like proposing on a first date—the answer will almost certainly be a swift “no.”

You’re viewing this all wrong if not asking for a link in your first email sounds crazy to you.

The aim of your first email is to start a conversation, not to close a deal.

So you want to end with something that prompts the recipient to reply.

Here are some ideas:

Is there anything I missed?

What do you think?

Do you agree with our conclusion?

However, those are still considered quite generic which is why it’s important to craft a unique outreach email not only for each campaign but also for each segment of prospects.

If that all sounds quite basic, it’s because it is. Outreach isn’t rocket science, and it’s not about using clever psychology or tricks to try to get what you want. It’s about treating people like human beings and letting your content do the talking.

The best way to think of it is like this: 

You’re contacting this person because you know they’re interested in a certain topic.

You think they might find value in your content.

Sending this email just so happens to be the quickest and most direct way to introduce them to that content.

Source:

Introduction: https://marketingland.com/blogger-outreach-119253

All the steps: https://ahrefs.com/blog/blogger-outreach/