3 Top tools for outreach success

Outreach is a key digital marketing tactic to boost your website authority, brand awareness and bring quality traffic to your website. Following some of our most popular posts around how to outreach for success, we thought we’d focus in on some of the best tools we use when conducting outreach ourselves here at iThinkMedia.

Why conduct outreach for your business?

Following on from our talk from content manager, Katie at our Digital Day 2017, you’ll be well versed in ensuring every piece of content you create moving forward is a masterpiece in itself. Why? Well, because ultimately great content will boost your SEO. But, most businesses stand still once they’ve created their piece of content, hoping that online outlets will link to it and therefore Google will serve it up in position #1. What if that never happens?

This post will fill in the blank spots between creating great content and getting it linked to by the right people. By following these straight forward steps outlined in this post you will be able to repurpose legacy ‘evergreen’ content and get it to really work for you.  

There are 3 main tools you’ll need for outreach:

These main outreach tools are:

• Buzzsumo
• Scrape Box
• URL Profiler 

1. Buzzsumo

Let’s agree that topical content, well researched, which adds to the body of knowledge around a given subject deserves to be linked to. But discovering topical content can be a bit of a minefield, to say the least! I mean, you saw the fidget spinner trend coming…?

Buzzsumo is a social media analysis tool that allows users to find out what content is popular by topic or on any website. You simply enter a keyword or phrase and it will return the most popular content by social interaction. This, in turn, gives you:

• A list of content by social shares
• The backlink profile of that content

Once you have a list of popular content ideas from Buzzsumo that you know are popular already with your audience and a list of online outlets linking to that content, your next step is to create your own masterpiece building upon what is successful already or perhaps amalgamating the best bits! 

With your content published or in the making, it’s time to build links and partnerships with prospective outlets who are right for your target audience and of a high quality to bring advantages to your overall website domain. 

2. Scrape Box

In order to conduct your outreach, you need to find sites that will be interested in linking to your content – this needs to be a two-way interest in order for this to work. Scrape Box will harvest a range of URL’s from a list of keywords and search terms. You can use the backlink profile from Buzzsumo to find similar sites.  

One of our favourite features on Scrape Box is that it allows you to organise your list and search for a specific group of websites far easier than most other SEO tools out there.   

3. URL Profiler

URL Profiler is the third phase of the outreach process. This compliments your long HTML list created by Scrape Box. 

Once you have a list of all the websites that are considered potential backlinks, you can then use the URL Profiler to gain more information about that website or landing page. 

URL Profiler can analyse the site in question by providing you with a range of link quality metrics, such as Majestic trust flow and citation flow, the page rank, the amount of social shares, the MOZ trust flow and much more. This useful information will allow you to analyse the quality and relevancy of the link and thus decide if they are a good quality influencer for your brand. 

On top of this, you can also use URL Profiler to scrape emails and contact information. This is, of course, essential to contacting and liaising with influencers. URL Profiler saves a lot of time so that you can avoid searching each website for email addresses and contact pages.

Once you’ve exported your data from URL Profiler and organised your list by those sites that are the most authoritative, you can start contacting the list or better yet, you might want to follow your list on social media. It’s an opportunity to softly introduce yourself before emailing them.

The final step – make it count!

The next step is probably the most fundamental to your outreach success.

You’ll have to craft an email that outlines why someone should link to your content and what benefits it would have for that particular media outlet. Make sure you point out ‘why’ it would be beneficial to not just them but their audience too.

The success of your outreach can massively vary depending on your approach, the quality of your outreach email and the match to your overall brand or content topic area. However, creating your influencer list using these tools is the first step to creating a successful outreach campaign.

Remember… you’ll find outreach is a test and learn approach. Find out what doesn’t work and change it up, alongside optimising what does work and building on your successes.

We wish you the best of luck with your outreach endeavours. If you do have any questions or need any support with your ongoing or next outreach campaign then do get in touch with us and we’ll connect you with our outreach experts who’ll be able to talk you through the best approach for your business.