This is a guest post by Pratik Dholakiya.

Blogger outreach is reaching out to the blogger community to create a relationship that involves you having regular, constructive and mutually beneficial contact with them. What this means is that you keep communicating with bloggers regularly and don’t just get in touch with them, when you want a guest blog to be posted.

I think of blogger outreach not from the perspective of an online marketer, but somebody who actually wants to strike up a conversation with the best in the field. Along the way, if they are willing to give me an opportunity to post a blog on their site, well and good; if not I still would like to keep engaging them at various levels.

What is Blogger Outreach?

Photo Credit: Kenneth Yeung on Flickr

Identifying and reaching out to online publishers is blogger outreach in a nutshell. Let me explain this phrase by way of an example.

X is a company that has seen its ranking de-value because of the recent Penguin update. Y is a company that has taken upon itself the difficult task of helping its rankings recovers from a Google penalty, and one of the strategies it identifies is publishing content on authority blogs, and getting backlinks from them. Google has made it very clear that it will give weight to only quality backlinks, and company Y needs to collect as much quality link juice as it can, to enable the website recover its rankings and achieve a sustainable high ranking on Google SERPs.

Now, the key to this process is knowing which content publishers to approach, approaching them, and then getting a guest blog posted on their site. But, this is not as easy as it seems. The way you approach these publishers forms the very core of Blogger Outreach. In effect, you are reaching out to other bloggers, but not just any bloggers; what you are doing is getting in touch with bloggers with potential and those who are well respected figures in their niche.

As can be imagined, there are two ways of approaching such bloggers. You make a list of them and then send an upfront mail asking them to publish your content on their blogs; or you could strike up an informal conversation with them, get to know them and their work better connect with them regularly and establish a comfort factor with them. Only later do you approach them to share your content on their blog.

So, which approach do you think will work best? No prizes for guessing, that it’s the latter, and this is what Blogger Outreach is all about. By taking the example given above, we can say that Blogger outreach is a concept wherein Y will first identify blogger Z, they will both interact with each other, thus building trust between them, and then getting down to the brass tacks – publishing of content.