Every business that is trying to gain digital exposure for their destination website is producing some form of content, for either their own blog or for outreach on partner websites.
If you are working on the latter, it’s very useful to know what will increase your chances of getting positive responses (to your cold, intro emails) and then getting the best exposure you can for your brand.
Firstly, recipients respond well to companies and representatives that look like leaders within their field. Ensure your brand and website project yourselves as being a leader, as any outreach partner will want to provide their audience with content from the best sources.
When getting in touch, find the most relevant contact by finding topically related content on the partner website and then seeing who published it. Contact the editor or publisher and reference the article you came across as this shows that you have done more than just pick a domain and website that looks nice, you’ve audited the content, and you feel that your offering would be a great match.
When conducting outreach, keep your initial email short and straight to the point. Don’t beat around the bush and be clear on why you feel the partner would benefit from having your content on their website. If you don’t get a response within 5 days, don’t be disheartened, follow up!
Many responses actually come from follow up emails chasing a response than the initial email, just because people are so busy!
Keep an outreach log by creating a spreadsheet so you can keep track of all websites you outreach too, the contacts for each, and successful placements. Over time, this will develop into a database for you and if you are good with your communications you will be able to start developing relationships with key partners for more strategic placements.
Finally, ensure you measure the gains you are making from your outreach. Outreach is not just about getting links, it’s about aligning your brand and product offering with relevant, sector based partners that can put your content in front of your target audience.
The best piece of content outreached to the right partner will result in referral traffic, clearly measurable through google analytics. If you don’t get referral traffic (any you may not from all placements) you can measure things like your Domain Authority and the Trust Flow and Citation flow of any links as this will help to develop your destination websites profile overtime.
POLARIS is an SEO agency that offers Digital outreach and PR services.
