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How To Reverse Outreach: The Newest Way of Content Marketing
As a content marketer, your mission is to build an audience online, establish authority, and create content that people want to consume. The ultimate goal is to bring traffic to your company and transactions for your service or product, making one of the biggest efforts in your content marketing ‘authority building’. If you’ve spent time doing outreach emails for link-building and social media shares, you know just how hard it is to scale.
You can spend all day compiling a media list to request backlinks from, and only get a small response rate. That’s why Brian Dean of Backlinko, invented a new content marketing technique called reverse outreach. In this short article, we’ll review step-by-step how to execute a reverse outreach campaign to scale your link-building efforts.
Table of Contents
Why You Need a Link-Building Strategy
Before we review what exactly reverse outreach is and how it works, it’s important to understand the necessity of having a link-building strategy. It’s been proven that backlinks are the biggest contributing factor to domain authority, basically, the search engine’s way of judging how good your website is.
The higher Google ranks your domain, the more priority you get for crawls and ranking for specific keywords. You’ll notice the search results that appear first on google SERPs usually have the highest domain authority, so if you want to rank on Google, you need backlinks.
Introducing Reverse Outreach
Reverse outreach is a content marketing technique created to save you time and effort; invented by Brian Dean, one of the most innovative SEOs and content creators in the world.
This proven technique involves creating content specifically made to be linked to and shared. The beauty of this technique is that it attracts the link builders to you rather than you having to chase after them. Brian Dean himself used this technique to build 5,660 backlinks in a single month without having to send a single outreach email!
So let’s dive in and go over the steps to creating irresistible reverse outreach content that attracts the backlinks to you.
5 Steps to Create Reverse Outreach Content
1. Find Link Creators
The first question you need to ask yourself when writing a reverse outreach email is, what information are journalists and bloggers looking for right now? The link creators in your industry are precisely those bloggers and journalists that write about anything in your industry. They are the ones that will link to your content when it’s a valuable resource for their article.
You’ll be happy to know that bloggers and journalists often look for content to link to add credibility to their work. Though, this may feel unnatural initially because you’re not writing for your usual target audience. Good ideas for types of reverse outreach blogs include extensive lists of statistics, best of blogs, quotable quotes, and more. Anything that can help a writer make a point and have someone else to refer to works.
You’ll be happy to know that bloggers and journalists often look for content to link to add credibility to their work.
2. Find Journalist Keywords
How do you find the topics that journalists and bloggers are searching for, you ask? The Answer is with some good, old-fashioned keyword research. Keyword research is every SEO’s best friend. You’ll want to find keywords that journalists and bloggers often search for and go after those. Make sure to write down all the keywords that you are going to be including in your article for later.
3. Check Search Suggestions
After searching for the keywords and their corresponding content, it’s time to look at search suggestions. The search suggestions will show you what people on the internet are actually searching for. If you’re researching a certain keyword, the search suggestions hint at what kind of questions people are asking on that topic on Google.
Let’s say you have a travel blog. If you see that many people are asking what the biggest city in the world is, it could be a good idea to answer that question in your reverse outreach article.
4. Competitor Blogs with Many Shares and Backlinks
Using SEO tools like ahrefs or SEMrush, you can investigate the competitor’s top content. For this strategy, we’re not looking for content with the most traffic but rather the content with the most social shares and backlinks. As a reminder, our goal here isn’t to get the most clicks, it’s to build domain authority by getting backlinks.
Those topics and questions that competitors answer in said blogs are precisely the kind of topics and questions you want to answer in your blog.
5. Trending Topics
Trending topics are good to write about because there usually isn’t a lot of information on them yet. If you can create content that will answer people’s questions, your content will show up first on google. Naturally, anyone writing about this trending topic will need to link to your helpful content on the subject. It’s all about covering a topic first; be the first to write about it, and you’ll be the first to get backlinks.
6. Write an Outline
Once you understand the topics you’re writing about and the keywords you want to rank for, it’s time to write your outline. Make sure you are actually covering the topics that you researched. Your topics should be those highly searched for and with very little available information.
If there is a lot of information about it already on the internet, fret not! You can still use the skyscraper technique to write content that will rank higher than everyone else’s.
7. Collect Data
The next step, collect your data. So you have a bunch of questions and topics that you want to answer and cover, you’ve done the research on what gets the most organic backlinks, now it’s time to find the answers to those questions.
Search the internet for statistics and facts to answer everyone’s burning questions and compile them in your blog article. Make the content as valuable as possible to that so that journalists and bloggers can’t resist linking to you.
Here are some quick tips on where to collect data.
- Statista is an excellent source of statistics. You can research relevant statistics for your article here.
- Other blogs are a great source of information. The best part is that when you link to them, you can build relationships with said bloggers- this can be useful for you in your future endeavors.
- Check out companies’ about us pages. They’ll generally post about users’ growth numbers which can be a helpful resource for journalists and bloggers to use in a quote.
- Try to optimize for Google featured snippets. That way, your answers to people’s questions will appear in the search results, making it much easier for bloggers and journalists to find you.
- To quickly get writers to want to use your information, include charts, infographics, and crunchy quotable statistics.
9. Publish Your Work
Now publish your article, sit back, and let the domino effect occur. Backlinks generate higher domain authority which in turn generates even more backlinks. And the cycle continues.
To make the text appear for specific parts of the video, you’ll need to add text to the reel. Once the text has been added, there will be a little bubble at the bottom with the text you wrote. If you click on the text bubble, it will show your whole reel edit and allow you to lengthen or shorten the text to your choice and at what point of the video it should appear and disappear. To add more text, just repeat the process- here’s an example:
Final Thoughts
If you’re familiar with the pains of email outreach for link-building, this strategy should land you with backlinks from journalists and bloggers in your industry. It’s incredibly easier than reaching out to everyone individually. Have you tried other creative link-building strategies? How did it go? What results did it bring?
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