So, you’ve put together your blog or product website – now all you need is visitors.
You blast your website on social media pages, telling your friends to share and subscribe.
Your views … trickle in. Slowly.
This won’t cut it.
How do other blogs get so much traffic so quickly?
Easy: They’re being more direct.
Getting traffic to your blog isn’t a passive activity. It takes persistence, and it takes putting your website in front of as many eyes as possible.
Yes, I’m talking cold approaches – email networking and pitching.
And while it feels awkward and takes a lot of work, it’s crucial to getting your blog growing, fast.
Here are 5 tips to quickly grow the scale and impact of your blog.
1. Get your content in order
It’s hard to know where to start with email pitching, but really the first step should be obvious: make sure your content is ready to share before you send a single email.
Post regularly, write quality articles, and keep your website running smoothly.
In other words, make your website worth visiting and revisiting.
It makes you a more attractive site to link to, for one, but it’s also a huge wasted opportunity if you get links and haven’t done this.
2. Develop an attractive, easily shareable piece
Whatever your niche, whatever your product, you need at least one piece that stands above the rest.
Yes, the supporting content matters, your website has to have more than just one piece worth looking at. But the value of having an awesome resource, created by you, that people want to share – that can’t be understated.
How to do this is a strategy unto itself, but even if you can’t put together a “wow” piece, having at least one great piece is still necessary.
3. Reach out to existing contacts
Your next step is to find ideal bloggers to contact; you might already have a few avenues to start with.
If you’re selling a product or your website is for an existing business, you already have an interested group of people: your customers.
Too often I hear business owners wondering how to increase traffic to their website – but their customer outreach is sorely lacking.
Using your existing customers and prospects can allow you to quickly get your products in front of people who already know (and like) you.
If you’ve received some comments on your website or social media channels, it doesn’t hurt to reach out to those who have shown interest in what you’re publishing.
And of course, there might well be bloggers following you on social media. Look into the people who’ve liked or followed your pages to investigate their online presence and follow up on promising leads.
In other words, if the prospect of cold-emailing people is daunting, you can start by reaching out to those who’ve encountered your work already.
4. Evaluate potential targets
The bread and butter here, though, is high-profile blogs who are close to your niche.
Every bit of that description is key when it comes to deciding who to put on your wish list.
Ideally, you want popular bloggers, and it’s a good idea to put potential contacts in tiers – starting with moderately popular sites and working your way up.
These bloggers should be engaged with their audience (making readers more likely to follow the link to your site), and of course they musthave content related to yours – or there’s no reason for them to link in the first place.
Before building a list of ideal bloggers from scratch, you might want to consider joining some existing blogger networks. These networks can connect you with brands (enabling you to build backlinks all by yourself) and you’ll be introduced to other bloggers in your niche (helping you build your list).
You can also just search for blogs according to key terms related to your website.
The bottom line, though, is that you want to go down every rabbit hole, steadily developing a solid list.
5. Start sending emails!
The emails are the easy part.
Here are three key points to keep in mind, though.
- Write clearly and professionally and try to demonstrate that you’ve read the blogger’s work. No one likes to read an email that seems like it could be sent to anyone, so take some time to include reasons why you’ve reached out to each individual blogger.
- Be brief. People don’t like having their time wasted, so they’ll either resent you for making them read a long email, or … [DELETE]
- Offer them something of value. Being asked for favors can get irritating, but it’s even worse when you don’t know the person. If you can make the blogger feel like you’redoing thema favor, then you turn the reaction on its head. There’s a myriad of things you can offer: guest posts for their blogs, contests, awards, and if you sell products, samples for review are almost always welcome.
Conclusion
Email pitching and networking feels awkward if you don’t know what you’re doing.
But you should also keep in mind that all of the most popular bloggers have done it at some point.
So, while they won’t all agree to work with you, just a handful of positive responses can get your audience growing faster than you’d imagine.
Isaac Bullen is a University of Plymouth graduate and a digital marketing consultant living in New Zealand, who helps businesses grow and succeed online. To find out more about Isaac you can connect with him via LinkedIn, Twitter or by leaving a comment below 👇
