Guest-Post
Keys-to-Success
A Few More Outreach Tips You Should Use in 2017
8:37 AM
Despite the fact that lots of marketers around the world have already earned a great reputation, it is still hard to find the only one solution to build a profitable business.
Unfortunately, there is no universal remedy as there is no an exclusive formula on how to create a lucrative business. Nevertheless, the endless chase in finding new solutions forces us to keep on enhancing skills in developing a business using old and brand new techniques.
Taking into the consideration online business, you must clearly realize that this type of business has its own features:
- Creating lots of high-quality content
- Building business relationships within your niche
- Earn traffic
- Backlink exchange
- Fight for your rank position in Google search
Yes, if you are, even, a skilled businessman who has already built a business empire outside the internet, it doesn’t mean that you’ll be on top in the world of web. Here you should claim mantle of an internet marketer.
Yeah, it goes without saying that you can hire professional bloggers who will pitch your blog up with fresh high-quality content, use some services for earning more traffic on your web resource BUT you must have skills in doing OUTREACH.
Outreach is a kind of relationships between marketers who want to move a market in terms of some particular niche. It requires specific knowledge and abilities to accomplish basic steps on the way to success.
In this article, I want to introduce you (or, even, remind) some tips you should use in this year to gain a success building an online business.
- Prepare the Basis First
Any engineer will tell you that if you want to build a bridge, you must prepare the basis first. Otherwise, this bridge will ruin afterwards. The same thing happens to online business - without a right preparation, your outreach won’t succeed.
You might ask: “What is the constituent of this basis?”
I will reply you in a few words: niche, target audience and influencers.
It is strictly important to do an outreach within your niche of business. I believe you will agree with me that being a representative of, for example, a food market it is gonna be ridiculous to pitch your production up to those who represent auto sales (or, at least, you will have to find the leverage on how to do it). Anyway, you got the clue. Find your niche and discover it inside out.
As you have already made a decision in terms of the niche you represent, it is time to find your target audience.
Luckily, it is not as hard as you think. You, as a talented marketer, know that the best place where you can find your target audience could be various relative blogs, forums. Moreover, thanks to social media, you will find people you need over there.
Yes, your target audience is the source of traffic you need but you should remember that sometimes the quantity is not as important as quality.
As you can see, I’m coming down to a question about influencers.
Dealing with influencers you must decide for yourself what type of influencers is not your speed. No, it doesn’t matter that you don’t deserve their attention! It means these people are too busy and they won’t waste their time reading your humble message where you’re trying to offer your service.
Thus, before you choose your ‘target’, you should know what types of influencers exist:
- Spawn. These people have just “sunk” into an online business - they have neither good traffic nor powerful web resource. I can assure you they will reply your message anyway. However, I wouldn’t recommend you waste your time on these people.
- Small fish. Perhaps, this is the most common group of marketers on the internet. People from this group have a very poor audience; they are trying to get the upper hand and that’s why they consider every message from other marketers as a chance to succeed. Yeah, they will reply you.
- Big fish. Here you will meet really tough ladies and gentlemen. There are still some chances for you to reach them up but you will have to send them only personal emails (or some unique templates). If you get a luck and some person from this group gets in touch with you, you will get lots of exposure for your website.
- Sharks. First, I wanted to tell you “forget about this group” but maybe you’re the lucky one and you will reach some “God of marketing” out. Here is the thing you should remember - forget about templates at all - focus on personal emails. I know it might take lots of time before you discover the information about the person you are interested in. Nevertheless, a single reply, for example, from Neil Patel could turn your business in a desirable direction!:)
OK, let’s presume you’ve already chosen your niche, found your target audience and, even, set sights on some cool influencers. What next?
The next tip to follow is collecting the data you need.
- Collect the Proper Data
The best way to reach out the influencer is to send a direct message using his private email address. However, I believe you have already noticed that sometimes it is just impossible to find one’s email address. Due to some reasons, people prefer to avoid publishing their contact data throughout social media accounts and, even, websites they work on.
Yeah, as I have already mentioned above - there is no sense to send the message using third party email addresses. If you are a bit confused what I am talking about, I will show you how these third party emails look like:
info@nameoftheresource.com
contact@nameoftheresource.com
Yet still, these third party emails might be the direct email addresses of website owners. So, be attentive in finding the right address.
In cases you don’t know how to find private email addresses, you can check out social media accounts. I personally always do a research via social media first and such method gives me the results I need. Just find the person you need on LinkedIn, Google+ or Facebook and verify ‘contact info’ section:
Google+ ‘contact’ section:
If social media doesn’t provide you with this information, you should use specialized services to find these personal email addresses.
I recommend you to work with find.thatemail, voilanorbert and hunter.io.
After collecting contact details you should proceed with the next tip - creating personalized email templates.
- Create and Use Personalized Email Templates
I would like to start this passage with examples first:
Or how about this one:
These two examples of messages show two important elements of personalized templates. You can see that I try to create a subject for every message I sent as personalized as I can. I must admit I had to search for some information about hobbies, preferences these people have. Afterwards, I just combined the main reason why I’m writing this person with recipient’s daily stuff. Yes, it sounds a bit ridiculous - the mix of cigars and SEO - but this scheme worked in my case:)
The next position you should give attention to is the introduction of your personal email. Remember, if you don’t catch the recipient’s eye starting with a few first lines, he or she won’t continue reading it (and the recipient will never stumble upon the service you would like to offer him or her). Thus, switch on your imagination, filter the data you have, associate some achievements the person had gained before with the particular message and voila - you sent a personalized email. If you have doubts about this time-consuming and tedious process, here is what you’ll get in return (or a kind of it):
Yeah, not everyone does that for her:) And I am sure you the next one who will impress dozens of marketers with personalized emails as hell:)
If you need to get a more detailed guide on how to succeed in Email Outreach, thus check out this blogger outreach guide.
- Avoid a Direct Offering Your Product!
It is clear enough that you, me, and other marketers do outreach for offering services and link exchange. But no one wants to give you a thumbs-up by way of a grant because everyone wants to be on top in the niche you are.
That’s why you should be clever enough to hint the recipients on what you want him to do: link to your piece of content, share your content via social media or buy your product. I agree with you that the simplest variant is to ask the recipient what you want from him is via straightforward approach. Yes, those guys from ‘spawn’ and ‘small fish’ groups will provide you with the link (because they know you are a tough guy and it is honor to have some business relationships with you). But your primary targets (big fish and sharks) won’t even read your message after noticing such phrases as: could you, please, link to this article or It would be great If you could share it on social media.
I would rather provide you with the examples of how you should ‘hint’ and you’ll understand what I mean:
Or this one:
As you can see, I asked people to share their experience with us and there were no words about sharing our content or linking to it. People reply to such messages willingly just because they like when someone asks their opinion. Let’s see an example:
The truth is that if the recipient sees that your material is (or service) worth a link, he or she will link to it. Believe or not, every experienced marketer needs useful content mentioned on the blog. Again, actions speak louder than words:
Or like this one:
I hope now you realize the importance of ‘indirect’ offering your service or content. Use these tricks and you will see, people will love what you do for them.
- Yes, Follow-Up with Emails
The reason why lots of marketers never reach their targets out is because they limit themselves with a single message they send. However, some inexperienced marketers start to send messages a day by day or forget about the recipient at all.
You, as the man who has experience in marketing, should never do these two common mistakes.
Remember, if you deal with one who belongs to ‘sharks’ or ‘big fish’, you should never hurry with the following message up. These people are always busy and they get thousands of emails every day. And this is, perhaps, the only reason why you don’t get a reply on the same day (if you use some weird template for reaching out, your message won’t be, even, opened).
I believe it would be better to introduce you some examples and you will see what period it usually takes between sending the first message and follow-up one:
It was my very first message I sent to this person but I got no reply. I didn’t send him a follow-up message on the following day - I decided to wait for 5 months before sending the next one.
And I got his reply on the same day:
This very case took 5 months, however, there are lots of follow-up messages I sent in a week or, even, in a few days after the first email. It depends on the person you’re trying to reach out. Sharks and big fish require months, small fish - weeks or days.
I hope my examples proved you the importance (and effectiveness) of sending follow-up emails. Please, don’t neglect it.
Conclusion
Summarizing I can say marketers have to deal with some new outreach techniques every year. Some of these new aspects of outreach seem to work great, the others just fade away. We tend to back to old proven methods and implement them again and again. Nevertheless, the best option is to never forget the things that work and never disregard the things that have never ever been tried in practice.
‘Cut-and-try technique’ is the only source that leads us the right track!
Anyway, these 5 simple tips will boost your outreach for sure! Just keep on using these tricks and invent something new:)
Author’s bio:
Sergey Aliokhin is an Outreach manager at Ahrefs. He spends most of the time discovering and learning SEO and Internet Marketing tendencies. His primal goal is to study and practice new aspects of an outreach strategy. In his spare time, he likes to spend his time with family, visit specialized sports club, study martial arts. If he has nothing to do at all, he prefers reading books on science-fiction and playing the bass guitar.
Sergey Aliokhin is an Outreach manager at Ahrefs. He spends most of the time discovering and learning SEO and Internet Marketing tendencies. His primal goal is to study and practice new aspects of an outreach strategy. In his spare time, he likes to spend his time with family, visit specialized sports club, study martial arts. If he has nothing to do at all, he prefers reading books on science-fiction and playing the bass guitar.
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