How to Incentivize Bloggers to Promote Your Site w/ Sam Charles @SamCharlesUK #VCBuzz

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How to Incentivize Bloggers to Promote Your Site w/ Sam Charles @SamCharlesUK #VCBuzzLinks remain the most powerful search ranking signal: There’s no top Google’s positions without links

Links also bring traffic and leads… There’s actually no effective marketing possible without link building

But how to build links without entering the shady areas and running into a risk of being banned from Google? Let’s discuss!

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About Sam

Sam Charles @SamCharlesUK was featured in The Drum magazine 50 Under 30 list and nominated for “Young Search Professional” at the UK Search Awards.

Alongside running Float Digital, Sam delivers digital marketing seminars and workshops.

Questions we discussed

Q1 How did you become a digital marketer? What’s your career story?

When I left college I got my first job in a web development and branding agency. I wasn’t 100% sure what I wanted to do, but I knew I wanted to work in marketing. I was so lucky that while I was at university I had the opportunity to study abroad in Australia.

Ah it was! I was so lucky living just a stone’s throw from Surfer’s Paradise! The experience I had working over there was invaluable as well, it really set me up for future opportunities in the UK.

Living on the Gold Coast, near Brisbane, is where I landed my first digital marketing job with a beauty company (part of the The Hut Group). It didn’t take long before I fell in love with outreach and everything blogging related! Once I finished my course I moved back to England in 2012 and continued studying, set up my own blog, and started working at an SEO agency. I hopped to another couple positions before launching my own digital agency @float_digital in 2016.

Q2 If you want to start building relationships with bloggers, where should they start?

Building a relationship with a blogger means building a rapport. For example, I’m (unsurprisingly!) more receptive to outreach execs that take the time to genuinely learn about me and my blog, and put a little extra effort into their outreach email.

Follow bloggers on social media, engage with their posts, and contact them when you have a suggestion that may genuinely add value to their blog. Perhaps there’s a particular dates coming up which would be perfect for a collaboration?

Make it easy for bloggers to work with you.

Q3 How to get bloggers talk about your brand and link to your site?

Don’t get hung up on how bloggers link to you. Let them do it naturally, otherwise you risk annoying bloggers (which may result in a backlash!), and an unnatural looking backlink profile.

Don’t just target influencers with millions of subscribers like . These bloggers are inundated with request all day, everyday. Build relationships with content creators that are at the beginning of their blogging journey and grow with them.

Before you outreach considering, what’s in it for them? Why should they write about your company, and not the other 30 people that emailed them that day? Preparing a post for a company can take hours, so it needs to be mutually beneficially.

Exactly! Put yourself in the bloggers shoes, why should they link to you?

And then people wonder why their outreach campaign fails!

Q4 What are major blogger outreach mistakes and tips?

My lifestyle blog ranks on page 1 for highly searched terms, and subsequently I see TONS of outreach emails on a daily basis. This is great for research purposes and helps me reflect on my own outreach emails. These ones that really grind my gears.

The worst outreach emails I receive begin with some kind of lie (usually stating they’re a freelance writer or a blogger trying to get exposure!). This is my pet hate because they assume they can pull the wool over my eyes. I instantly take a disliking.

Another frustrating blogger outreach mistake is when it’s clearly been written from a template. I know it saves time but we see hundreds of these emails a day. Shake it up – I don’t even read a 500 word email about ‘how much you loved’ my last post.

One last one before we go onto the next questions.. (I could write about this stuff all day!). Emailing bloggers for social stats is a waste of time. Collate this data before you outreach to a blogger + make a decision on if you’re going to pursue them.

Q5 What are your favorite blogger outreach and relationship building tools?

I’m a huge fan of automation. It can save you a lot of time and make you money! HOWEVER, blogger outreach is one of those tasks that needs a human-touch. You can spot an automatically generated email a mile off, and it’ll probably be archive instantly.

Even though I believe blogger outreach shouldn’t be automated, there are a few tools that I endorse that make life easier. Firstly, is great for finding quality content which will lead you to influential bloggers.

is a great tool (not JUST for blogger outreach!). This decreases my to-do list because I can just use this tool to stay on top of my emails and be more productive. It makes blogger outreach a breeze when you’re in a sea of outreach emails.

is another great tool. It’s built to increase your sales but it works nicely for blogger outreach because you know if your emails are being opened. Perfect if you want to know if a blogger is ignoring you.

can save you time without compromising your outreach quality. It quickly pulls all the email addresses you need from your prospect list, enabling you to get cracking on the important stuff.

Our previous link building chats:

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