How To Outreach & Get Quality Links For Your Website

Outreach should form an important part of your digital marketing strategy. It’s great for both brand awareness and acquiring external links, as well as increasing your brand’s reputation – positioning you as a thought-leader in your subject.

One of the easiest ways to acquire links is to outreach a piece of shareable content, such as an infographic or guest article, that the publication will host and provide a link to your website as part of the piece. But just how do you go about doing this? We look at some of the best ways to get great results from your outreach activity.

Firstly, Why Do Links Help Your Website?

Links are important to SEO for two primary reasons. Firstly, with an increase in links to your website there’s a correlation to a natural increase in traffic. Links pointing to your site also help to increase your website’s credibility in the eyes of search engines, particularly if the website that is linking to yours has a high domain authority.

Websites are much more likely to link to yours if you provide them with a piece of useful content – something that their readers will find interesting.

Decide On Your Approach

There are two approaches you could choose to take for outreach, with different advantages to doing both:

1. Plan and create a relevant piece of content, then distribute it to your target publications. You can produce an infographic or piece of shareable content and then outreach it to a desired list of publications. The advantage of this is that you only have to make one piece of content, which is good if you have limited resources, and that it makes the process relatively simple for the receiver and removes any obstacles of them having to do too much to push your content live – if they’re interested in your content all they have to do is post it straight up and publish.
2. Approach publications first and pitch the idea of your content. This method is good because it means you won’t waste any time creating content that isn’t picked up and it allows you to adapt your story into something much more likely to be published. However this method can end up with you having to create multiple types of content for different publishers and it can also be harder to get initial traction with the publication if you have no example of your writing style/previous content to show them.

Planning Quality Content

Good content is central to outreach. You can think wider than just your service offering: for example if you’re a kitchen company you could create content around food, recipes and health rather than just focusing on the appliance products you sell. Great shareable content is made when you think of an idea that resonates with your audience.

Find An Angle

Any idea can be turned into a great story by finding your own unique angle on the subject. Do you have some statistics or facts that could put a slightly different spin on an existing story? Or have case studies to give a unique view into a subject? By putting your own personal touch to a story you can create content from existing topics that still provide a new and relevant read for your audience.

Use What You’ve Got

You’d be surprised how much information your business holds that can contribute to a story. Sales figures, user surveys, audience behaviour data, supplier statistics, industry reports…all of these are full of rich data that can be used to create content.

Finding Websites To Reach Out To

Begin with a simple google! Look for local newspapers, blogs, forums, advice websites and more to create a list of websites that may be interested in publishing your content. There are often a list of ‘best blogs’ for each particular industry, which makes a great place to start.

Approaching Publications

Reach out to the publication and ask if they’d be interested in publishing your content. It can often be hard to get your content picked up, but there are a few ways to increase the chance of your success with this stage.

• Find a specific contact to reach out to and address the email to them
• Use a catchy subject line that will grab their attention
• Include an embed code if outreaching an infographic for ease
• Offer to send the infographic in their preferred format, such as jpeg or sized for social media
• Point out the way in which your article is relevant to their readers

Remember, outreach can be time-consuming and you often won’t receive back a reply from the publication, even if you chase up. Don’t be put off – even just acquiring one quality link can boost your SEO and see great returns!

Learn More About Outreach Today

Want to find out more about creating an outreach strategy, or optimising your website for SEO? Learn more about our search engine optimisation services, here.