Blogger outreach has often been synonymous with terms like guest posting and guest blogging in the past but it’s fast becoming a pivotal part of PR.
Successful blogger outreach relies on utilising as many channels of communication as possible and one of the most effective channels is social media.
By using social media you can reach bloggers much easier and when you do drop them an email later on to talk further (or pick up the phone) they will know who you are and be much more likely to take you seriously.
In this post I will show you a number of tools that help to bridge the gap between social media and blogger outreach.
Before we dive into the post, it’s important to note that when working on any blogger outreach you need to be targeting the right people and by that I mean you need to be targeting bloggers that are influencers within your target market. The tools that I have included below will help you target the right people.
#1 – BuzzStream
BuzzStream is a fantastic tool that allows you to manage every step of the blogger outreach process.
You can choose to go for either the link building version or another version of the system that is more geared towards social media and PR. I’d recommend going for the latter as there are a few particular features that are specifically tailored to helping you find the right bloggers to target (I.e. – bloggers that have influence over your target audience).
Here are a few of BuzzStream’s features:
- Social media influencer research and discovery
- Built in task management system
- Contact info research
- Create list of bloggers to target for outreach
- Relationship management
- Response rate tracking
- Team collaboration
BuzzStream’s pricing starts at $19 per month but larger plans are available allowing you to scale up as much as you need.
#2 – Inkybee
Inkybee is a system that I have been using since it was in private beta earlier this year – it’s currently a big part of my teams work flow at the marketing agency I manage.
Despite the tools available on the market, Google search has always been something that I find myself going back to in order to find new and relevant blogs to contact.
Although that in itself is a time consuming process – something that Inkybee has allowed us to leave behind.
Inkybee allows you to create relevant lists of bloggers using a great system that validates each blog with an RSS feed so you know that the results you are being served are actual blogs. This saves an incredible amount of time.
Inkybee allows for list segmentation, weekly reporting and pulls in some great metrics that help with the decision making process of who to contact. Some of these metrics include:
- Location
- Audience size
- Engagement
- Average posts per week
- Days since last post
- Twitter and Facebook followers
- SEO metrics pulled in from the Moz API
You can manually add blogs and then incorporate them into outreach campaigns. Inkybee allows you to track your relationships and also monitor the success of blog posts by pulling in social metrics.
It gets even better…
Inkybee has Twitter integration functionality that allows you to connect your Twitter account – the system then pulls out your followers/friends blogs and gives you some helpful metrics.
Inkybee’s pricing starts off at $19/month similar to BuzzStream and offers a free trial so you can see just how powerful this system is for yourself.
#3 – Nimble
Blogger outreach is all about building connections and maintaining communication with those connections.
One of the best and most effective ways of doing this is using a CRM (customer relationship management) system.
The problem with most CRM’s is that they just aren’t that easy to integrate with social media and usually have limited functionality. They are designed for sales or just managing a database of customers and the truth is that you need much more than that.
This is where Nimble comes in, it’s a CRM with a difference – it combines a contact management system that shows everything that is important to you with task management, sales tracking and a unified inbox.
Where Nimble really comes in useful with blogger outreach and social is it’s social listening system – this means you can keep tabs on your outreach targets or pull in new targets to contact.
Nimble integrates with the following tools:
Nimble’s pricing starts at $15/month/user and there is a 14 day free trial available so you can take it for a spin.
#4 – Traackr
Traackr is an extremely powerful tool that is better known as an influence marketing tool but can work extremely well for blogger outreach.
When you search for influencers there’s no guarantee that they will have their own blog, but most influencers either run their own blog or contribute to authority blogs within their industry.
Traackr can help you find all of the blogs and websites that your target bloggers/influencers contribute to and displays their content so you can make the most of every opportunity possible to engage with them.
Some of the other features include:
- Sentiment analysis
- Influencer maps
- RSS feed curation
- Real time listening
- Geographically targeted searches
- And more
#5 – Little Bird
Little Bird search for influencers on any topic and then cross reference it with the locations of your choice.
One of the problems with running an outreach campaign is the difficulty of finding relevant bloggers in particular locations – this isn’t an issue with Little Bird.
Supported social networks include:
- Google+
- YouTube
- Slideshare
Little Bird will direct you to where valuable conversations are happening and highlight sub-communities within the topic that you are searching for. This is what the different colours on the influencer visualisation image above are showing.
Little Bird’s pricing starts at $50/month for a basic account.
#6 – Relately
Relately helps you keep on top of which contacts you need to stay connected with and also tracks your interactions with them.
One of the difficulties in managing an outreach campaign is visualising your interactions and remembering what you have said to bloggers or any of your other contacts in the past.
When you are juggling a lot of relationships online, being able to keep on top of this is incredibly valuable and that’s just what Relately helps you with.
Relately brings communication channels such as social media sites like Twitter and Facebook together with email.
Pricing is very straight forward here, there’s no paradox of choice here, just unlimited everything for $27/month, well almost – plans for teams are available but limited right now to 5 spots.
Taking things a step further
All the tools in the world won’t guarantee that blogger outreach and social media will work for you, there is a creative element that just can’t be substituted with the use of any online or software based tools.
Part of it involves putting together outreach emails that convert well, I talk about this more here.
Summary
Blogger Outreach used to be a term mostly associated with guest blogging and usually revolved around heavy use of email.
While email shouldn’t be taken out of the equation because it’s still an effective method of contact – social media is a powerful channel that can help you get impressive results when integrated into a blogger outreach campaign.
Which tools would you add to the list?
