Why Salespeople Should Produce Content and How to Go About Promoting It
Link building is an important method to boost sales and reach out to a wider audience. Links are one of the top 7 Google ranking factors - that’s how important they are to your success.
There’s one clear snag, however: Links don’t just come. They have to be built. One of the most common ways to build links is by executing an outreach campaign. In other words, producing valuable content before reaching out to related websites and bloggers in the hope that they’ll publish your article with a link back to your website.
In this article, we take a look at how to build more links via outreach so that your visibility and your sales increase.
What Links Will Help You Generate Sales
There are really two types of links:
● Healthy Links
● Unhealthy Links
Healthy links are otherwise known as high-quality links that come from relevant, high traffic and high domain websites - in other words, authoritative websites that Google trusts. Any website that you’re looking to reach out to in order to secure a link must be related to your niche, and it needs to be a reputable website that Google already trusts.
To find out how reputable a website is, you can use an SEO tool. Your tool will also give you insights into the link profile of a website, as well as its domain authority.
Relevancy, on the other hand, matters for two reasons: One, if a link is coming from a relevant website, you’ve got a much better chance of grabbing more of the right traffic, which will lead to an increase in sales. Their audience is already interested in what you do. Bingo!
Two, it shows Google that you’re improving the user experience by giving the right audience more of what they want. See, if you secure links from an unrelated website, you might end up with lots of clicks - but your bounce rate will be high. This will have a negative impact on your position in the SERPs.
Unhealthy links are either spam links (links that come from spam websites) or links from websites that have no relevance to what you’re doing. For example, if your niche is SEO, you’d reach out to digital marketing-related websites, as opposed to news-related websites like Bloomberg. A link from Bloomberg will not help you increase your sales.
What Type of Content Will Generate More Leads
Google is on the lookout for valuable, in-depth content that addresses and solves a user’s concern. The more value your content offers, the more you’re improving the user experience. This is what Google wants from you.
Users themselves want it, too. Indeed, according to research, long-form, in-depth content receives more traffic than any other type of content. The math here is simple: The more traffic you get, the more links you’ll secure.
And the websites and bloggers you’re reaching out to? They want solid, valuable content from you, too. They’ve got an audience to satisfy, and they’re not going to risk ruining their reputation by publishing a below-par blog post that doesn’t hit the spot. In order for your content to receive links, it needs to be awesome.
This means that you need to build up a solid back catalog of awesome, shareable and link-worthy content that provides as much value to people as possible.
Reaching Out to Outreach Influencers
Once you’ve decided on some content ideas, it’s time to reach out to influencers. Your mission? To persuade them to publish your content on their website with a link back to one of your pages.
What’s an outreach influencer? An influencer is someone in your niche who has a high traffic website. They’ve got the audience you want.
For your outreach campaigns to work, you need to get links from relevant authority sites and influencers across your industry. If you manage to get links from as many influencers as you can, you can expect far better results as compared to links from random blogging sites. Their audience will become your audience, and this means more visibility - and more sales.
How to make an effective influencer outreach campaign? First of all, you need to identify the websites and bloggers you want to reach out to. This shouldn’t be too hard to do at all.
For example, let’s imagine that I’m a digital marketer and want to reach out to digital marketing blogs. I type “digital marketing guest blogs” into Google, and as you can see from the image below, I’ve already found 20 digital marketing websites that accept guest blogs.
Once you’ve identified potential websites, run the URLs through your SEO tool to find out more about their domain and link profile. If they look legit, you then need to take a closer look at their current content. Is this the kind of content you’re producing? Would your content be welcomed by their audience?
To get a better understanding of who their audience is, check their social media profiles and see who’s commenting. You need to make sure their audience matches yours. If it doesn’t, you won’t rack up the sales, no matter how much your exposure increases.
Once you’ve decided that a website is legit and is the kind of website that would be receptive to your content, it’s time to pitch a few blog ideas.
Once you’ve done that, you need to establish contact. Instead of using a generic email template, use personalization instead. Mention a recent article by the person you target or say how helpful one of their advice is. Make this introductory email as personal as you can. For example, use their name and be engaging and even entertaining - but also as brief and direct as possible. You don’t want to take up too much of their time.
Also, clearly communicate the benefits that publishing your article on their site will bring for them, be it affiliate revenue, a stronger relationship with their audience, or another type of compensation.
Remember, you always need to demonstrate what’s in this for them. How is publishing your content and linking out to you going to benefit them and their audience? To convince them, highlight the value of your content. Show them what you’ve got and what it's worth to them and their audience. Everyone needs to benefit.
Getting links from the right influencer can generate an increasing number of visits and a growing number of leads over time. It will help build your mouth-to-mouth exposure, as their followers will start discussing your product or service.
Measuring Your Outreach Campaign Results
You can expect your link building strategy to be successful and generate sales opportunities if you follow the tips we have provided above. That said, you always need to be measuring your campaign so that you know what needs to be improved.
Do not be fast to make conclusions, as some campaigns will not generate immediate results. Measure the engagement rates and assess whether a campaign generates visits to your site. Assess conversions, too, and see what type of content performs best. For example, it might turn out that listicles are performing so much better than your in-depth case studies.
You also need to measure the ROI of a campaign by tracking the cost per lead acquisition and the lifetime value of each acquired customer. This way you will know if you need to improve a campaign, use another channel or close a campaign.
Make sure you have entered as much info as possible into your CRM and use tools such as Google Analytics to track the campaign results.
Using Outreach Software for Best Results
There are multiple software tools on the market that can help you make your outreach more effective and will allow you to monitor the overall campaign results. What are the properties of a useful outreach software application?
An outreach tool should enable you to sequence your emails and then monitor the status of each individual response and reaction. It should integrate with your CRM platform enabling you to import and export data about your contacts and campaigns. Team collaboration features are also useful as they allow you to work on a campaign as a team without leaving the software.
You can also use software that monitors the open rate of your outreach emails, which will help you define which email templates and subject lines work best. A good method to refine your campaign is to test pitch emails to find what email template and subject line get the best results.
When You Can Consider an Outreach Campaign Successful
It really depends on what you want to achieve. Do you need to boost your authority, do you want to generate leads or you badly need to improve your ranking? Well, you can achieve all of these through links back to your website but you must set realistic goals - and you must know what they are before you embark on a blogger outreach campaign.
That is why you need to connect your CRM to your outreach software and keep a good eye on the open rates, leads generated and the number of visitors and prospects resulting from a campaign. Hundreds of links to a high-quality industry report on your site do not necessarily increase sales but will definitely increase the number of visitors. Reaching out to bloggers by offering quality content and mutually beneficial collaboration will produce the best result.
Another factor to consider is how many shares on social media you get from links on other sites. Some likes and shares on social media could boost lead generation by 200 percent and more if you have quality content linked and shared by influencers and authority sites.
Conclusion
Linking to the right websites and blogs that have high authority and are relevant to your niche is of utmost importance. Also, you need to offer them quality content to link to and not just promote your product or service. Once you match the right website up with the right content, you’re onto a winner. It’s then a case of measuring your results and performance, and seeing what needs to be improved going forward.
About the author
Nikola Banicek is an internet marketing specialist at Point Visible content marketing agency. He’s a laid-back guy with experience in PPC, copywriting, and project planning. When he’s not working, he’s either gaming or watching anime.
