How to contact thousands of bloggers in one go, the legit way?

This article was updated on August 6th, 2020 at 05:57 am

You might argue that link building and guest blogging are dead, and that what happens today in the name of outreach, is spam. I will gladly agree partially. Because, I’d rather call this thing – Relationship Building. Read on..

So, traditional link building outreach is where you try and contact other bloggers for links. Bad idea. You are basically begging for links. One, it doesn’t work the way you’d expect. Because, reputed bloggers know that links shouldn’t be sold, so they’ll skip your request. If at all you fish out anything, and get replies agreeing to seed links, I can guarantee that they’re from splogs (or folks who don’t care about reputation what so ever.)

So, like I said, Relationship building, is how I’d do it. Remove your SEO glasses for some time. Imagine you’re a cool new app, fresh off the factory and is looking for some press. How would you get the eye balls? Would you go fishing for links or press? Press, obviously, right?

Now, that’s the idea. Forget links, you’re going to be fishing too close to the bottom when you focus on links. Instead, focus on mentions, brand awareness, eye balls, visibility, you know…stuff like that. Links and SEO might happen, as a bi-product. Don’t worry about that now. Try to get people genuinely interested in your brand, your site.

So, how do you go about doing this? How do you reach out enough number of people to ensure traction? Outreach, though being a good way to get valuable mentions, could be a tiring job and scaling it to the right volume, to ensure enough traction, tricky!

First off, here are some guidelines for doing outreach effectively.

– Try to do it on a bigger scale, and reach out to maximum number of people, or you’ll end up with little traction for a lot of work.

– Do not reach out to everyone you can imagine. Try to profile out your best audience.

– Make a huge list of potential folks.

– Consider a reply back ratio of < 10%, scale your full list accordingly.

– Be ready with your pitch before the outreach.

– Be ready with pitches with different Tone of Voices, casual, neutral, formal etc.

– Get thinking about how you can make maximum impact in least time. (Like, I have to tell you this..)

So, how do you do outreach to thousands of bloggers in one go?

So, assuming you have everything that I mentioned earlier ready, you’re now ready for the big shot.

How do you create the list of your profiled audience?

Some places I can think of, to go for are Alltop.com, Technorati.com etc where you’ll find lots and lots of blogs listed.

Go for your niche. Use this Google Chrome plugin to scrape out all the links on these directories.

Once, you scrape all the sites, use Buzzstream to automate and manage the whole outreach process. Buzzstream has a neat way of automatically fetching contact data from a list of given websites, and managing the stages between the outreach process. They have a brilliant tutorial here. Check it out!

Photo courtesy – Tug Agency