Making the most out of your content is about more than just designing or writing something brilliant unfortunately. It’s about finding an audience that wants to share your work. The way to build this is through effective outreach.
Outreach involves building quality links and placing your content on high profile sites. So how can you build an effective outreach strategy?
Understand the people you are reaching out to.
When doing outreach, it’s important to understand that you, a person, is reaching out to another person, even if you do both represent companies. Build up a rapport, offer them something of value and extend the hand of friendship well as asking for something in return and you’ll do much better. Highlight your authority by mentioning people you have worked with, or pointing out a high value piece of content you have created before, but don’t be too formal or you’re bound to put some people off.
Don’t waste your own time.
This doesn’t mean ‘go in hard and hit them with a call to action in the opening paragraph’. It means don’t go around trying to land outreach contacts that aren’t worth the time it takes to cultivate them.
One rule to follow is this – if the link was going to be a no-follow link, would you still go to all this effort? If the answer is no, you should probably write off the outreach. You need to focus on the sites that add real value to yours.
Rejection shouldn’t be an issue for you, in fact, you should be getting rejected. If you are facing this, try to find something that is mutually beneficial and try asking someone else about your newer, better proposition.
Be straight with people.
Remember that everyone knows what you are doing when you reach out to people. Rapport is important, but business is the primary goal of your interactions, so don’t be coy and pretend that you are trying to be someone’s friend. Discuss what you want from the relationship upfront.
Start an email with a line that at least alludes to the business implications of your message. Don’t be too forceful either, as this can scare people off. Finding the balance is tricky, but worth it.
Choices are important.
When emailing a potential outreach partner, offer them more than one option. Give the person an easy option. Add a larger, more preferable task such as adding a link to a blog post which you can create for them if they want to add more content to their site and you should have just handed them a reason to accept your offer.
Make your emails ‘must-open’.
Give your recipients a reason to open your email. Address it to them personally in the subject line and try and give it some context to help them make the decision to click on it.
If you can follow these five principles, you are more likely to build successful outreach relationships.