How to scale your content outreach

Last updated on January 18th, 2024

Pardeep Kullar
Pardeep Kullar

When you’ve published a blog post, do you only then look for people to contact to help distribute it? How many people have a ‘go to’ list for outreach? Can you really contact the same people again? Neil Patel and Eric Siu give a short smart talk on outreach, building lists and useful tools that help you speed up and scale outreach for consistently higher traffic.

**Summary points**

Content outreach is about reaching out to people to promote your content, it starts with the foundation. More than anything else, your content has to be GOOD.

2 key takeaways

  1. Have a list of people who will consistently promote your content and then rotate your content between them.
  2. In writing emails to people, make sure things aren’t fully templated.

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Transcription

Welcome to another episode of marketing school I’m Eric Hsu and I’m Neil Patel. Today we’re going to talk about how to scale your content outreach.

So what does that mean? What is content outreach?**

Content outreach is all about reaching out to people who can promote your content. When you write content it, doesn’t mean that it’s gonna do all right. Think about it if you’re doing content marketing there’s two parts to it, one is the content the second is the marketing.

To get more traffic and to market your content, in most cases, because you won’t have an audience which is fine, you have to do outreach.

I have someone from my team that actually does this fairly well. The one thing I’ll say about content outreach, at least in the very beginning, it all starts with the foundation.

Of course, the content has to be good.

If you look at Neal’s content, he’s constantly cranking out long-form content every single day and by default it’s almost it’s almost always good. It becomes easier when your content is actually good and when you outreach to other people it’s a higher conversion rate because people are like oh okay that makes sense.

People think: “What I was looking to in the past it’s not that good or what I was sharing in the past was not as good as this one, so I’ll go ahead and share this coz or I want to look good you know. If I’m sharing it on social media or you know I want to look good on my website when I link to the best resource

So if you’re looking to build that foundation, initially, I would say Google the skyscraper technique and read what Brian Dean has to say about that one.

Create a list of outreach people, don’t hit the same ones repeatedly

The thing to keep in mind when you’re doing outreach is, you need to create a list of all the websites or social media users that you’re doing outreach to and then put a tick mark next to them every time you hit them up.

Let’s say you produce content in quantity, you don’t want to keep hitting up the same people over and over again who are sharing your content. They’re gonna get overwhelmed and they’re gonna eventually stop sharing your content because they’re gonna get irritated.

Cross off people who ignore you and you’ll have a powerful list

On the flip side, you’re also going to have people who don’t respond or ever want to share your content so you don’t want to keep emailing those people who are always saying no to you.

If someone says no, or they ignore you two or three times, why would you keep emailing five six seven times right?

Just cross them off your list and eventually what you have is a solid list of people that you can continue outreach to.

Tools to find emails that speeds up the whole process

I’ll give you a couple tools here so what I like to use for what I’m finding emails I like using Hunter.io or you can findthatemail

[We transcribers recommend: https://anymailfinder.com for emails that don’t bounce, reference this article and get a discount :)]

So there’s different tools here to find different emails for outreach.

A tool for PR

There’s also another tool used for specifically for PR that I should be using. Actually really really good it’s called Justreachout and you can find the right emails for, let’s say, different editors, different publishers and things like that.

Email tracking and scheduling tool

You make a list of people to outreach to and then also you know I’ll combine it with an outreach tool like let’s just say mixmax. I use mixmax, they’re a client of ours but you know it’s it’s great for our outreach because you can follow up with people too and you can also individualize the outreach too.

Customise one sentence so they know you made the effort

Often times I get a lot of emails and for me I can tell immediately when it’s a templated email. But you know, even if I get like one sentence that’s customized, I’m gonna actually spend the time to read it and I’m gonna understand that hey, they made the effort.

You don’t want to make it all a hundred percent templatized you want to have you know at least you know 10 to 15% that’s actually you know actually customized.

It’s a long game, be consistent

With content outreach you know it’s the long game. Let’s say you don’t really have an audience to begin with it takes a long time, it’s a long slog. If you listen to us from the podcast in the past I talked about, even with the journey, with the first podcast, I was getting 9 downloads a day after the first year right. It just takes time.

Just make sure that you’re being consistent with it.

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Related: For outreach to influencers, see why Gary Vaynerchuk says use Twitter, Twitter, Twitter.

Pardeep Kullar
Pardeep Kullar

Pardeep overlooks growth at Upscope and loves writing about SaaS companies, customer success and customer experience.