You’ve had all the best advice we can give you about blogger outreach from our perspective. Now it’s time to get some advice straight from the horse’s mouth.
We spoke to two prolific bloggers with years’ of experience in the blogosphere. Here’s their take on the good and the bad of blogger outreach strategies based on their experiences.
Jesse Audubey, Blogger at Hecticophilia.com and Digital Content and Community Manager at Nuffnang UK.
Jesse says:
“When you work with a blogger, you are collaborating with a creative individual who has spent a lot of time and effort creating an online space of their own (most of the time aside their full-time job), and has created a community of loyal and engaged readers and followers.
There are many benefits in collaborating with bloggers: leveraging the trust they have built with an audience that are potential customers for you, getting rich and original creative content (text, pictures, video) about your brand from an influencer, and driving awareness and goodwill for your brand with potential conversion into sales.”
Here are Jesse’s top tips for establishing relationships with bloggers:
1. Address a blogger like you would another business owner that you want to collaborate with. You would make sure you are clear about your USP, what you’re envisioning from the relationship and what’s in it for them. The same goes for bloggers, if you approach them in a professional manner, they will be professional with you and you establish trust right from the start.
2. Be personal, relevant and above all realistic: bloggers have lives, commitments and to be honest, many other opportunities. Most bloggers are really interested in the right collaborations, it helps them build legitimacy for their blogs, attracts new readers, showcases their skills, and provides them with case studies for other brands they want to work with. But it does have to be the right collaborations.
Kat Molesworth, Blogger at Housewife Confidential and Co-Founder of Blogtacular
Here are three Do’s and Don’ts to remember as recommended by Kat Molesworth, Blogger at Housewife Confidential and Founder of Blogtacular:
The Do’s
– Get to know bloggers. Have a reading list and check in on Twitter and Instagram. You can find out a lot about whether someone is right for your client by interacting with them over time.
– Consider having budget for blogger involvement. Just like you, a blogger expects to be compensated for their contribution to a campaign. Way back in the process, before you pitch and design campaigns, work in budget for the bloggers. Especially if your campaign involves any length of time it has to be a consideration – you’re not doing it for free and neither should they.
– Give bloggers creative control. Bloggers know their audience intimately and they understand how they react to products within content. Let the bloggers create content which suits their blog and reflects their creativity – everyone is going to be happier with a well-pitched, native post.
The Don’ts
· Don’t have your first contact with a blogger be a pitch or request. No relationship should start with your hand out. Your chances of being accepted are far higher if bloggers know who you are.
· Don’t send batch template emails. We can all spot them and I’ve lost count of the amount of times I’ve had a mail addressed to the wrong person or with 50+ emails in the to field.
· Don’t pitch the same content to twenty bloggers. Blog readers and bloggers all read widely and if you hit a group of people with overlapping audiences, chances are you’ll turn people off the product by the time they reach the third identikit challenge post.
So, what are the secrets behind a big, successful brand/blogger campaign? We also spoke to Kat about one of her more recent and high profile brand collaborations with B&Q to find out…
Here’s what Kat had to say about the project:
“Last year I revived our back garden which had been destroyed by children. It was a large and costly project. I reached out to B&Q with a photo of my garden and an outline of the type of posts I was planning for the project. B&Q’s team could see the value in the project and supplied me with a gift card to cover the renovations and an offer of unlimited advice. As a PR project it worked out well. I dripped content over a long period of time which B&Q shared across their channels and my readers were engaged with our complete ineptness. Our beach hut shed post is regularly in my top ten most read posts which is great in terms of long term impact. The team at B&Q are a credit to the industry, headed by Ali, they understand bloggers and give them the freedom to work to their strengths. I’ve seen collaborations with bloggers culminate in B&Q being mentioned on Design*Sponge – not something I could ever have predicted.”
You can see the posts from the whole project here.
The key take aways from Kat’s collaboration with B&Q are:
– Make sure bloggers know you are open to collaborating with them (it’s a two way thing!), you never know who’ll drop you an email.
– Give bloggers the autonomy to be creative, they know their audience better than you, and will know what they like.
– Offer bloggers something genuinely useful to them and their audience.
If you’d like a hand starting your own successful blogger outreach campaign, get in touch with us today.
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