Best Practices For Your Outreach Campaign

If you are an ecommerce website, you are probably quite far down the line with your Christmas outreach campaign to improve your ranking for a specific product keyword. These campaigns often require time to initially build up your contact list; do your research into the publication you are contacting and then refine the email or conversation you plan to have with the editor. Often though, it is important to focus your attention to detail on the article that you wish to have placed.

Relevance & Purpose 

As updates to the Google Penguin algorithm have made it wiser at spotting irrelevant or spammy sites, it is vital that you provide a publication with a piece of content that is of value to their audience. This will not only establish a relationship with the outsource contact but also get your website noticed for its manual organic outreach strategy. The purpose of links is to direct the audience to the pages that they will enjoy reading, which will ultimately result in positive engagement with both the article and your business.

Ensure that your content also has purpose. If you are creating an infographic, are you simply looking for the audience to read the information contained within it, or is the aim to send them to a product page or your homepage? In the case of a blog article that contains a link to your website, it is essential to make the sentence or paragraph, where the link is contained, the most poignant part of the article. This will give the reader the incentive to revisit that paragraph upon finishing reading the article and click on that link to find out a bit more about the author.

Be Human

This characteristic will of course depend on the publication and audience you are writing for, but having a more ‘human’ voice in your writing will help readers relate to what you are saying. If you are writing for an interior design or home décor blog – look at the most popular articles and overall themes amongst the targeted audience and think about how you could incorporate these elements into your writing.

Don’t force your website link to the readers either. If you are looking to drive readers to a particular product page, make sure the context is right. Discussing an everyday problem and then offering potential solutions is often the most commonplace scenario to insert a link to your product.

Originality

This can often be easier said than done, especially when it comes to brainstorming for very niche products or services. From previous experience, I have learnt that creating content ideas for some client products is not always as straightforward as it seems. Just when you think that you have discovered a completely original piece of content, you realise that it has been previously written by a similar site. This is where a discussion with colleagues to raise everyday problems related to a specific subject will help uncover concepts that have never been thought of.

The above is especially true of Christmas content ideas. I have noticed from researching lifestyle and family blogs that most of them tend to write about Christmas in late November or early December. Therefore, if you are looking to send your ideas in to publications earlier than this, make sure you have done your research to establish that it has not been written about before and that you are contributing opinions or data that will be of interest to both the editor and reader.

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