Unless you have had your head buried in the sand in recent months you’ll know that content marketing and outreach is THE critical off page technique to ensure the long-term success of your business.
A lot has been written about how to use various cool techniques to do it, whether you’re a fan of ego baiting, co-relevance content creation (explained in this deck by Mike King, interactive infographics like this one, persona outreach or some other ‘cutting edge’ technique to maximize your chances of link and content placement there is still something missing.
Undoubtedly the above approaches work and if you’re good your conversion rate from blogger contact to content placement can be extremely high.
For me, however, there is one critical aspect of all of this work that most are missing and that is that we are overlooking Google’s future intentions for search.
While the outreach technique works now a sea change in the way those GooglePlex engineers want to promote content and with it assign authority could make the current processes obsolete, or at least much less effective.
We have been experimenting with personas (creating carefully constructed profiles to maximize the chance of blogger engagement) for some time now and we’ve learnt a lot.
Firstly, they work! As James Agate’s piece on the Daily Blog points out there is little doubting their effectiveness.
We’ve also learnt that names matter. Don’t go with obviously fake names that clearly show little effort in their creation. Susie Smith, for instance, just makes you think ‘Spam.’ Instead think about the market you are attempting to work with. Although we have yet to test the theory scientifically yet, from what we have seen to date there does seem to be a correlation between inferring that you COULD, in some way, share the same name as a well-respected person in the industry you are targeting and success rate.
The point is though very few seem to take them any further. They are used and abused. Cast away with the trash and that’s a travesty if you understand where Google’s expected to go with content promotion. It’s made to look even worse when considering the best planning for improving your future hit rate.
So what is this advanced content outreach I talk of? Well what follows below, to be precise…
What is it?
There are several high quality articles out there covering how to do outreach; from how to create your prospect lists to how to form your emails and approach your initial contact strategy. It’s been said and we’re not interested in covering old ground here.
Nope. What follows is a technique that requires resilience, planning and great processes to be effective. Get it right though and placing content, even in some of the toughest markets and amongst the savviest of bloggers becomes, relatively speaking, a synch.
My background as an editor has taught me the value of great contributors. Get your columnists and regular writers nailed and you sell more stuff. Unequivocally. The hard bit is keeping them or masking their value so they don’t price themselves out of your budget.
This made me think… What if, when working on persona outreach, you could ‘create’ the perfect columnist for each of the major niches that you work in regularly? You could create an army of relevant bloggers that have a track record of published content, which you can link to as part of the pitch emailing process
Receive an email from a person with a track record and you are 10 times more likely to respond.
But this isn’t the best bit.
To understand the TRUE value of what you are creating here we must cast our minds back to Google’s announcement last year that they would be supporting Rel Author mark-up. It was a move that resonated with many in the search space and guys like Bill Slawski have covered acres of browser space writing about its significance. I too covered off the subject in a guest post for Richard Baxter’s SEO Gadget and it’s worth a read for some background on how it could impact search marketing, as we know it.
The bones of it is that Google is collecting data from us at AUTHOR level now, giving it the ability to make websites and pages redundant and placing the greatest writers and subject experts at the heart of the game once more.
It’s really exciting but what it also means is that you must start planning right now for that change to begin building up authority in the space that you wish to ‘own’. Whether you’re a builder, finance expert or knitting champion the key is now to earn shares and links from your posts over time to prove your expertise. Why? Because it’s most likely that you’ll appear top of any searches (particularly those affected by the Google Freshness algorithm tweak).
Google is building a mass of data at author level right now and as rel author take up increases that pot will only grow larger and with it their understanding of who the key figures are in each niche. Do it right and your ‘persona’ could be one of them and become extremely valuable as a result.
So why does this impact persona outreach? Just as in magazine and newspaper audience creation and retention you need to find a way of creating iconic authors within the space/s you want to boss without having to hire the most expensive and in-demand in the business. And the best way of doing that is to create your own character.
It’s been going on in written media for decades and now is the time for it to become truly effective in the digital world
How does it work?
The process is a simple one. Create a rock solid persona for each space that you need to hold an effective, long-term position for. Think hard about names, email addresses, even images of you. Twitter accounts, personal blogs and Google + profiles can make this façade even more powerful if it is critical for your business to place a LOT of content on a regular basis across a number of relevant blogs and websites.
The key then is consistency. Look for places where you could contribute regularly and work hard building their following.
And if you need more simply rinse and repeat until you have a little army of expert bloggers all of which you control completely and don’t have to pay a pretty fortune for the privilege while they build up their own personal profile!
To really make it work you’ll need to create and maintain a Twitter account and even a personal blog but if its hard-to-obtain links you are after then the ‘cost’ is more than worth it. Working in one competitive market alone we think we have saved thousands in freelance costs over the past few months.
Takeaways
Persona outreach has come a long way in a short amount of time. Building personas for the long term is the next step in its evolution and while some may think it is a step too far the reality is it’s a technique that has been used for decades by the best newspapers in the business to sell more copies. By my book that tells me it’s going to be a killer technique for the digital world too and below is a simple flow diagram of the process to make it super-easy for you to follow:
I’m Simon Penson, founder of content led SEO and social media agency Zazzle Media. You can follow me @simonpenson
