Blogger Outreach Services That Kick Ass! [2020 Update]
Outreach/Link building can get tough and boring.
But it is a necessary evil! (Still the #1 differentiator).
There are many places such as Fiverr, Upwork, and Facebook groups where you can get outreach links, but you’re better off without them.
Then there are agencies that have the audacity to provide hacked links for their clients, and sooner or later, they find themselves in trouble (One Example).
To solve this problem, we are recommending agencies that we both work with and trust. And we’ve partnered with over 20 agencies this year both to test them, and to check if the services they provide are of the quality we need for our client’s sites.
You will learn what we look for in a good blogger outreach service, and we explained how you can use our experience, to carry out your own checks.
Why Do You Need a Good Outreach Service?
- You probably don’t have the time to learn what it takes, and even if you do, you are using your business time on a service that can be outsourced.
- The cost of reaching out, creating content, and expertise to find a website that will help you get recognized can be high AF.
- Sometimes saving money can be expensive. So, getting an expert who has an established track record is likely to be a better option than someone who have just started out and is looking for clients to practice on.
- Good agencies have established connections that can be utilized to advertise your product or develop your site's SEO.
- Last but not least, you need marketing to get in front of your target audience. A good outreach service increases your reach fast!
What Does a Blogger Outreach Agency do?
#1 Find Awesome Prospects:
It’s not an easy job to find good prospects for link placement and that’s whether it’s for referral traffic or to achieve AWESOME SEO value. This can mean a 40 hour a week job just to find good prospects and then you need to assess if they will provide the results you’re looking for. (We’ve explained how to judge a site for marketing further down, read the full article if you can)
#2 They Connect With The Prospects:
In order to get placements, they need to effectively communicate, negotiate, and make a connection with the bloggers. Then they’ll need to provide them with value as well and that might include financial incentives, links, or products.
#3 They Develop a Content Strategy for You:
Depending on your marketing plan they will also help you to develop a highly successful content strategy. For example:
Get content with a link back to your site -SEO.
If they get a review post on that site - Branding.
And if they get a post for your service or product range, and it ranks, then you will probably get sales too - Referral traffic.
Most of these blogger outreach services are built around SEO. The brands we mention also provide referral & branding content but they can charge between $2000–5000 for a post. But, if you have a good budget, the results can be awesome!
#4 When Your Order is Delivered, They also Track Rankings for You!
Most Blogger Outreach agencies track rankings for SEO campaigns and they provide you with SEO suggestions based on your market. Importantly, the top agencies do all this without being intrusive. Well, the #1 company on the list does!
So, let’s now move on to find out how you can prospect good sites. Do be aware that it will take time to learn how to judge a site for yourself but you should always have at least a basic understanding of the process. After all, an informed buyer can make an educated decision!
Actionable Steps to Judge Blogger Outreach Services
This guide is designed to help you to assess sites. It will also provide advice on the questions you can ask the outreach agency if you don’t have time to check out the sites yourself. It’s not unusual to test 5–6 agencies before you find one who you can work with full time. (I know you want to find out who the test winner was, it’s coming real soon!)
#1 Traffic
We use Ahrefs & Similarweb for traffic estimations and to judge whether we should invest any further time in checking out the site.
If a website has 250+/m traffic on Ahrefs, it probably can help your SEO. But, we then have to dig deeper to see if that’s truly the case.
#2 Is the Site Beneficial for SEO or Not!
Now you need to check whether or not you will be provided you with a do-follow link. If you’re paying for backlinks, you need do-follow links on powerful blogs.
To check if the site meets your criteria, you will have to check the backlink profile. You can establish the authority of a website by assessing the number of referring domains and more importantly, the quality of those referring domains.
For example:
Canva has 129k referring domains and if you check their links, they include Forbes, Entrepreneur, Guardian, and many other huge news and business sites. This then means, that if you are in graphic design or any other similar niche, and you get a link from Canva, it’s going to be a huge, huge win!
Link building is a continual process which means that it will represent a large part of your marketing budget if you want to get organic & referral traffic.
However, getting a link from Canva is going to be tough. So, check out #3 section, for an example which uses Home Business Mag. This explains how it can be used for both SEO and brand recognition through organic traffic. We’ll also explain the importance of relevancy.
Read this Canva case study on why you should keep building links for your company’s SEO.
#3 What Keywords Rank for the Site!
A site's traffic is often used as a way to sell guest posts, link inserts, and ad spaces. To solve this problem we check what ranks on the site.
First Example: Medium.
If we check medium.com, it’s a high authority site however, anyone can post. So, is it a good option for marketing your product or for the SEO of your site?
For SEO:
The site provides a UGC Nofollow link, which is of no use if you want to push your site’s rankings.
For Brand Recognition,
It is ranked for a ton of what could be detrimental keywords such as “kickass proxy”, “Youtube to Wav converter”, etc. So, more than likely, people did articles to push their brand and then get around 70k people per month to their site. That’s pretty good for 1 post. Check sites like Medium to see what you can do to push your brand!
Another Example: Home Business Mag
Home Business Mag, became famous after SEMRUSH started selling links on their site. Then Google caught them red-handed on twitter: https://searchengineland.com/semrush-drops-paid-guest-blogging-service-after-google-policy-scrutiny-335544.
Google doesn’t want users to do any type of link building for SEO purposes because they know it works. They can penalize both the link buying and selling websites. This then means that you need links that won’t trigger penalties. Ensure you use a safe mix of anchors and get links on websites that don’t openly advertise the selling of do-follow links.
For SEO Purpose:
A do-follow link will help your SEO effort. This site would be awesome for consultancies that help people to start a business and would also be effective for other business consultancy websites.
For Brand Recognition:
If you own a pet business consultancy, for example, you could create a post entitled “How to Start a Pet Grooming business” along with similar other entitled articles.
#4 Site Traffic- Is it Increasing, Stable, or Decreasing?
Not the only measure you should use but it helps! You can check traffic trends using Ahrefs, which will highlight if the keywords and traffic have been going down.
You will notice that the traffic is consistent throughout the year and then grows after May’s update. Therefore, getting a link on the site would be a good option as Google appears to be favoring it for more keywords. That means, it can then transfer trust to your site when a link is placed.
Don’t forget that tier-2 links to your post can dramatically help with power too.
If we then look at this site, it’s pretty clear that they lost all trust after the May update. If you get a post on this site, you probably won’t get any trust factor transfer but you can still get power if it has good backlinks(Refer #2 point). That’s the reason PBN links can also work!
We personally don’t recommend getting links from a site like this. That’s because if you have a lot of sites like this in your backlink profile, it could also harm your site. We love backlinks which also provide trust.
Don’t forget, more traffic doesn’t mean you will get better value for your link, you have to consider the relevancy too!
If you get a link from a fish blog for your site on aquariums, it’s going to be more powerful than one which comes from a site ranking for mattresses.
Note: Ahrefs is just an estimation tool. Its traffic and keyword number are all estimated from the data they get after repeatedly crawling Google search results.
#5 Last but Not the Least, Check the Content on the site
Is the blog posting 10–20 articles a day? Is the content of good quality and does it provide value? Do all the articles have outbound links to low authority sites?
If the website accepts 10–20 articles a day and links out to crappy sites, it’s probably a guest farm site, so it’s best to skip it and look for higher quality opportunities.
That’s all you have to do to test if the placement will be a good option for you. You can do it yourself but 1 link could easily end up costing you $1000 dollars when you take into account your time and subscriptions for tools such as Ahrefs.
Finally, it’s time for our blogger outreach service reviews!
Best Blogger Outreach Services in 2020
Outreach services can either make or break your business! That’s why we only considered agencies whose services we have used.
This is not an affiliate marketing article. Instead, we show you the metrics and traffic value, along with information on what we really liked about each agency.
#1 Art of War SEO (Check Agency Site)
This is an agency that we’ve invested $120k with over the last 9 months, which equates to around 600 - 700 links. At the moment we order around 150 links per month both for our own sites and our clients.
Here are a few links we got from them, we bought 5 x DR50+ links for our supplement brand.
The price we paid: $1800 ($360 per link)
We are very happy with the results & links they get for us. Our average spending per link at around $200. We mix up the metrics of the links to achieve greater diversity & present a more natural appearance.
Art of War SEO is starting a new campaign for us on this site with the aim of ranking our outreach posts. With a cost of around $1500 per post, we’re seeing some impressive results already.
The site we are building links to:
We began getting outreach links in December for this site, which had launched just a few months previously. Prior to that point, we had only used pillow links. We ordered 20 outreach links every month from Art of War SEO and we started to saw results in March.
The website is constantly growing and getting very nice revenue for our clients.
What we like:
They promise 1000 traffic with all their guest posts/outreach posts
Their professional and prompt communication
Excellent SEO Knowledge which enables them to make personalized recommendations for each client.
We highly recommend using their service!
Check out: Art of War SEO, a UK Agency.
The Hoth (We don’t recommend them)
We bought 10 DA30+ guest posts to test, they were bad. Got placements on horrible PBN look-alike/Guest farm sites. Waste of $2,250 IMO. Didn’t get any help after the placement. So we just added The Hoth to the list to tell you to avoid.
Just check this image:
You can get much better links at this price from the aforementioned agencies.
We won’t recommend using them!
Who Should Use These Outreach Services?
- Businesses: Brands selling physical or digital products should invest in these outreach services to help their SEO. Speak with your agency to see if they can get you placement on blogs to grow sales and develop brand visibility.
- Affiliate Marketers: Affiliate marketers should buy these for SEO purposes to improve their rankings on Google. This will then enable them to increase their earnings from Amazon or other affiliate schemes.
- Other Agencies: People who are looking to outsource the work without degradation of the quality, a real risk when using freelancers or noobies. Once in the hands of a trusted SEO agency, time is freed up to concentrate on other aspects of the marketing plan.
Art of War SEO Is Our Top Recommendation:
#1 Their communication is AWESOME! They will guide you to establish the aims of your marketing campaign and then provide solutions to help you to achieve your goals.
#2 They are not just about selling backlinks, they work with you to grow your revenue as well. We have never worked with an SEO agency who was as motivated about our business as we are!
#3 If you are buying these links for SEO, these can really move the needle, they constantly check the sites for all of the criteria we’ve discussed. Links from sites like these are good for SEO as long as they are do-follow & contextual and they link out to other authority sites to increase the authority of the content.
#4 Best of all! We currently spend around 20k a month with them on our E-com site, we only promoting stuff that we actually use.
How to Use These Outreach Services Effectively?
We use these links for both our websites & clients.
#1 Communicate
Clearly communicate your goals with your agency and ensure their strategy will allow you to meet them.
#2 Diversify Your Campaigns
Use outreach links to different pages on your website, so that means don’t get all the links to your service/money page. Remember to use different topics on the blogger’s website, don’t promote the same topics within all of your outreach posts. That’s likely to create a footprint that works against your website's SEO.
For Example,
If you sell dog collars, you should not send in all your outreach links to one specific page. Instead your website should have marketable content like “Fashionable Dog collars” “Biodegradable Dog collars” and “Different Types of Dogs Collars you can buy” then divide the outreach links to these posts. It will help users find dog collars they are looking for, and you will rank for more keywords. You win!
#3 Ask for Anchor Text & Topic Advice
The Hoth is pretty unresponsive after the purchase, you just get the link pointing to your site after 20 days or so. They didn’t help with topic or anchor text selection. We want the agency to use safe anchor texts and diverse topics. We don’t want to get the same topics if we order 40 outreach links. That would suck!
What we loved about the Art of War SEO was that they contacted us as soon as the order was placed and then developed a great understanding of our goals. We have now contracted to a monthly package of 300 outreach links for our clients. We just have to send them the client's specifications and they take care of the rest.
#4 You Have to be Consistent with Link Building
This is how you invest in an online business. You have to keep pushing links and get bloggers to mention your product to be alive on the internet. After all, SEO can help you with more sales than PPC if done correctly. So, set a budget and keep investing every month with a good agency.
#5 Be Patient with Your Results
The links that you buy now might give your rankings a push in 3 months' time. That’s why you have to be consistent and keep at it. Keep marketing your products within engaging content and SEO will work in your favor to get the sales that you need.
Why Did We Test these Services & Why Do We Recommend Art of War SEO?
We test a lot of services for our clients and we have been using Art of War SEO for the last nine months both for our clients & some of our own affiliate sites.
We usually need 150–300 outreach links per month for our supplement websites. This isn’t an easy sector, so there aren’t many agencies that can get that many links per month. That’s why we have tried different SEO agencies to complete our quota.
We love working with Art of War SEO, they provide the quality of service we need and provide great links that have an awesome impact.
We definitely recommend them for your blogger outreach campaigns, you won’t be disappointed.
About us:
Webminati provides consultation services for eCommerce businesses(Supplement Industry)& develops 6-month or 1-year action plans to develop sales through SEO. The company is owned by Deepanshu Bedi & Ivan Marsh.
