When you’ve published a blog post, do you only then look for people to contact
to help distribute it? How many people have a ‘go to’ list for outreach? Can
you really contact the same people again? Neil Patel and Eric Siu give a short
smart talk on outreach, building lists and useful tools that help you speed up
and scale outreach for consistently higher traffic.
Summary points
Content outreach is about reaching out to people to promote your content, it
starts with the foundation. More than anything else, your content has to be
GOOD.
2 key takeaways
-
Have a list of people who will consistently promote your content and then
rotate your content between them. -
In writing emails to people, make sure things aren’t fully templated.
Transcription
Welcome to another episode of marketing school I’m Eric Hsu and I’m Neil
Patel. Today we’re going to talk about how to scale your content outreach.
So what does that mean? What is content outreach?**
Content outreach is all about reaching out to people who can promote your
content. When you write content it, doesn’t mean that it’s gonna do all right.
Think about it if you’re doing content marketing there’s two parts to it, one
is the content the second is the marketing.
To get more traffic and to market your content, in most cases, because you
won’t have an audience which is fine, you have to do outreach.
I have someone from my team that actually does this fairly well. The one thing
I’ll say about content outreach, at least in the very beginning, it all starts
with the foundation.
Of course, the content has to be good.
If you look at Neal’s content, he’s constantly cranking out long-form content
every single day and by default it’s almost it’s almost always good. It
becomes easier when your content is actually good and when you outreach to
other people it’s a higher conversion rate because people are like oh okay
that makes sense.
People think: “What I was looking to in the past it’s not that good or what I
was sharing in the past was not as good as this one, so I’ll go ahead and
share this coz or I want to look good you know. If I’m sharing it on social
media or you know I want to look good on my website when I link to the best
resource”
So if you’re looking to build that foundation, initially, I would say Google
the skyscraper technique and read what Brian
Dean has to say about that one.
Create a list of outreach people, don’t hit the same ones repeatedly
The thing to keep in mind when you’re doing outreach is, you need to create a
list of all the websites or social media users that you’re doing outreach to
and then put a tick mark next to them every time you hit them up.
Let’s say you produce content in quantity, you don’t want to keep hitting up
the same people over and over again who are sharing your content. They’re
gonna get overwhelmed and they’re gonna eventually stop sharing your content
because they’re gonna get irritated.
Cross off people who ignore you and you’ll have a powerful list
On the flip side, you’re also going to have people who don’t respond or ever
want to share your content so you don’t want to keep emailing those people who
are always saying no to you.
If someone says no, or they ignore you two or three times, why would you keep
emailing five six seven times right?
Just cross them off your list and eventually what you have is a solid list of
people that you can continue outreach to.
Tools to find emails that speeds up the whole process
I’ll give you a couple tools here so what I like to use for what I’m finding
emails I like using Hunter.io or you can findthatemail
[We transcribers recommend: https://anymailfinder.com for emails that don’t
bounce, reference this article and get a discount :)]
So there’s different tools here to find different emails for outreach.
A tool for PR
There’s also another tool used for specifically for PR that I should be using.
Actually really really good it’s called
Justreachout and you can find the right emails for,
let’s say, different editors, different publishers and things like that.
Email tracking and scheduling tool
You make a list of people to outreach to and then also you know I’ll combine
it with an outreach tool like let’s just say mixmax. I
use mixmax, they’re a client of ours but you know it’s
it’s great for our outreach because you can follow up with people too and you
can also individualize the outreach too.
Customise one sentence so they know you made the effort
Often times I get a lot of emails and for me I can tell immediately when it’s
a templated email. But you know, even if I get like one sentence that’s
customized, I’m gonna actually spend the time to read it and I’m gonna
understand that hey, they made the effort.
You don’t want to make it all a hundred percent templatized you want to have
you know at least you know 10 to 15% that’s actually you know actually
customized.
It’s a long game, be consistent
With content outreach you know it’s the long game. Let’s say you don’t really
have an audience to begin with it takes a long time, it’s a long slog. If you
listen to us from the podcast in the past I talked about, even with the
journey, with the first podcast, I was getting 9 downloads a day after the
first year right. It just takes time.
Just make sure that you’re being consistent with it.
End
Related: For outreach to influencers, see why Gary Vaynerchuk says use
Twitter, Twitter,
Twitter.
