Outreaching, How Far Can You Go?
SEO is coming in to the limelight and businesses are taking it more seriously, numbers of people who want all in $300 a month are slowly dying and one can witness some businesses investing some good budgets in order to enhance their online presence and reputation.
As part of SEO and Link building, Outreaching is considered to be the back bone as it allows you to get introduced to many other people within your niche, share experiences with them, build healthy connections achieve goals (i.e links and more…) that are of mutual benefit.
Outreaching is amazing as well as fun because it allows you to communicate with different people from different parts of the world and at the same time offer you quality links and a chance to display your brand as an expert within the targeted audience.
Outreaching for a common SEO is sending quality and personalized emails to different bloggers, journalists and other people with the intention to build connections and get links out of it but limiting outreaching to sending emails is actually limiting the scope of it… In my opinion outreaching is way more than that.
How far Outreaching can go?
I think outreaching is more than just what we know today, in fact many front line link builders and SEOs are following and implementing a different definition of outreaching. Outreaching is more about building connections and getting links through it, which cannot be circumscribed to just sending emails and waiting for the prospects to reply to it.
Outreaching is actually the effort you put in by going out of your comfort zone in order to meet new people and put up a good will with them. Thus it may be by meeting someone in person, sending birthday gifts, making phone calls, doing something special for someone that allows him/her to notice you and many such ideas that one can think of. I think outreaching is actually as far and wide as you can think and are willing to apply (keeping the budget in mind).
Here are a few of the ways you can outreach to your prospects to build connections which can later help you for links and many other things.
1. Sending Emails
This is the most obvious way to build connections and get links. The idea is to send outreaching emails to the desired person and wait for him to read and reply. I have also discussed about how you should write email that get a better rate of response. Write better emails, get more response, build connections and convert them in to links…
2. Phone Calls
This is not really surprising for many as there are people who are already using this technique to make new connections. The idea is very much similar to sending emails the only change is that instead of writing emails of 100 and more words you have to call that person, talk to him to get to know each other.
It might sound easy but it’s a bit more technical and personalized so you have to be careful or else while calling you might stain your reputation instead of building it. I would advise you to call only journalists or hard to find people. It’s better to call them with a strong objective point so that you can talk and discuss things easily with all due respect.
3. Meeting in Person
This is the most powerful way to build connections which you can later convert in to links, building reputation, making money and more. I personally have done this by meeting Rishad, after just two meetings we became really good friend and since then we have discussed many ideas, shared views and have even passed a few clients to each other.
Remember, meeting someone in person means that the person is giving you some dedicated time so don’t waste it by talking about the weather reports. Instead do your homework nicely, go prepared and talk of something intelligent and thoughtful so that he would be happy to meet you again, and who knows you may get a mention of this meeting with you on twitter or may be in one of his blog posts.
4. Birthday Gift
This is a little different than all the ideas discussed above. The idea here is bit more similar to link bait but this will also allow you to build connections which may eventually help you get multiple high quality links and more.
The idea is to send a birthday gift to the person (especially if you are reaching out to a known personality) and try to send the gift keeping their interests, likes and dislikes in mind so that the chance of a response to that gift via email, call, meeting or social mention can be maximized . Once you get a response, you are a winner! Now all you have to do is to strengthen that connection and convince that person to link to you!
5. Contribute where they contribute!
If you are trying to reach out to a person who is a celebrity in their respective niche then this might take time but will work well. The idea is to find out the platforms where he/she usually contributes actively and then try to contribute regularly on the similar platforms. Become an active member so they can easily notice you and then if you outreach to them you might not get flushed into the spam box in a single go!
In my opinion there are many other ideas that people can use to build connections with the most powerful people within your niche, which I believe brings us to the conclusion that outreaching and building high quality connections (that can convert in to high quality links) may not be confined to sending personalized emails but there are uncountable ways that people should try to get attention and start building connections and links.
If you have more innovative ideas that allow people to connect, please share in the comment section below!