Target audience: Marketing professionals, PR pros, brand managers, SEO specialists, businesses.

It’s essential for brands to have access to and a relationship with their current customers and clients as well with their fans, natural allies, their topical neighborhood, and their prospective and future clients. In a post-Internet world, this is best handled online, for efficiency’s sake.

No matter how obscure your product, service, book, business, or project, there are surely thousands and thousands of online denizens who may not yet know of you but who would be as pleased as punch if you were to reach out. Outreach marketing, formerly known as blogger outreach, is a powerful tool with almost zero barrier to entry — just your time and attention.

If you’re seeing this post on Monday, April 7, or in the morning of Tuesday, April 8, you’ve got a treat if you can make the time. GroupHigh is presenting a day-long event called the Outreach Marketing Virtual Summit the entire day of April 8th, 2014, between 10AM and 7PM Eastern Standard Time. It’s free and online so register!

Be sure to clear your calendar and spend the day with Bill Brennan, Bryan Kramer, Crosby Noricks, Bridget Duffey, Sam Zivot, Robin Carey, Phil Butler, Stephanie Scott, Andy Sernovitz, Lee Odden, John Hendricks, Danica Kombol, Katie Paine, David Meerman Scott, Lynette Young, Tracey Parsons, Laura Fitton, Travis Wright, Mary Eitel, Zoe Waldrom, Andy Theimer, Maddie Grant, Katie Greenlaw, Shelley Kramer, Heather Whaling, Kristen Matthews, and me. I’ll be presenting between 2:20 and 2:40 PM EST, 11:20-11:40 PST, and 19:20 BST for you gang in the UK.

But since the presentations are pre-recorded, each of us presenters can spend our twenty-minute presentation times responding live to tweets, chats, and questions. I think it’s a brilliant idea because whenever I am participating live in a webinar or QA session, I don’t have the personal bandwidth to answer questions and queries as they come in. Just for the record, tomorrow’s hash tag is #outreachmarketing and my personal Twitter handle is @chrisabraham — I hope to see you there.

I have done blogger outreach campaigns for the Alzheimer’s Association, Greenpeace, Habitat for Humanity, HSN, Kimberly-Clark, Sage 50, Mitsubishi Motors, Sharp, Snapple, Snuggle, Levi’s, CliquMe, Stever Robbins, City Creek Center, Miznuno Runnning, and others.

Every one of these companies, organizations, and non-profits could easily find an enormous pool of friends, followers, allies, and brand ambassadors with whom to engage and for whom news about each brand introduced through a pitch resulted in powerful earned media mentions, buzz, conversational volume, tweets, retweets, Likes, and posts on Pinterest, Tumblr, blogs, Facebook, and Google+.

It’s not rocket science but it requires that you get over yourself and start treating all of those Likes, followers, subscribers, and Pinners with a heck of a lot more respect than you probably do right now.

Remember, each and every one of the billions of real social media profiles around the world represents one or more human souls. Real people with real hopes, dreams, passions, wants, and needs. Discovering and engaging with the magic hundreds, thousands, tens-of-thousands who are already passionate about you is a start — and a great first step — but then going further to find those magic tens of thousands who don’t know you yet? Now that’s when the magic starts happening.

And, because there’s effectively zero barrier to entry, I would love to tell you everything I know about how I do it in a brief 20-minute Slideshare and PowerPoint presentation. In preparation of my session, How to Engage Bloggers Down the Long Tail, I have both uploaded the presentation deck up to Slideshare and the pre-recorded presentation to YouTube — so, you’ll be prepared to ask me any and all questions you may have about the presentation, my process, and even questions you may have about things that are going on with you in your business.

The post How to engage bloggers down the long tail appeared first on Inside Social Media.

Last week, I wrote about how to succeed with B-list bloggers, but maybe some of you aren’t convinced. So, this week, I want to draw an analogy to successful Google AdWords approaches so that you can see how to apply that same technique to blogger outreach. When it comes to reaching out to bloggers online, there’s a lot you can learn from Google AdWords. Long-tail blogger outreach is like long-tail Google AdWords advertising. Instead of putting all your money on the top 10 most expensive and popular keywords that everyone bids on, smart advertisers segment their markets and hyper-target their highest-performing keywords with their most compelling ads and content while always pruning away their worst performers.

The same should be done with blogger outreach. There will always be blogs that are out of your league and your target audience. Instead of hitting your head against the wall by trying to make it onto TechCrunch and Mashable, learn to segment your blogger list, target more precisely while expanding your pool of bloggers past the top most blogs that tend also to be the most exclusive and difficult to break into — out of your league — to blogs and bloggers who are just starting out, who blog more from passion than ad revenue, and who are naturally more receptive to your content and your message based on a natural affinity.

Affiliate marketers have learned that they can reliably make money by spending money on Google AdWords by finding keyword phrases with such low bids that they can make money from the relatively small commissions or bounty they get from converting the click throughs to sales. Millions in yearly profits cent by cent, dollar by dollar. A cascade of small sales made by people who were so well targeted to that they were almost powerless to resist.

The same thing can be done with blogger outreach. If you’re able to find yourself thousands of bloggers who have yet to be discovered by your all your competitors, you’ll be able to secure hundreds of earned media mentions. In concert, hundreds of earned media mentions both drown out a single post on TechCrunch and also do a better job or finding what you really want: sales.

All the most successful AdWords gurus, such as Adam Viener of imwave, realize that you can only make money in affiliate marketing with Google AdWords if you can make more money from your converted sales than you spend. You can’t do this unless you find the magic sweet spot where there aren’t many competing bidders who are bidding up the price of your keyword phrases so that you can both keep your spending low and also increase the likelihood that those who do stumble upon your ad will not only click through, costing you money, but also make a trackable major purchase, resulting in a commission–in commissions–that cover the costs of the ads and then some. This is not easy and the field fluctuates.

It takes expertise and vigilance, Adam tells me, and a mistake can be costly. One possibly apocryphal story reported that there was a very profitable keyword phrase that suddenly also became popular and the bids shot up without someone noticing, resulting in the equivalent of a Range Rover being lost in one day. Because of such high risks tantamount to the stock market, these folks are very good at discovering and milking the long tail, realizing that making a little bit here and there spread concurrently over hundreds and thousands of ads and keywords is more profitable, long term, than making a single big score.

If you’re loaded with cash and don’t really care about extracting value from your campaign, you can spend all your money on trying to get your ad copy at the top of every Google Search just to see it there but being constantly outbid by others, ultimately clearing out your budget or maxing your credit card; the same can be said with regards to blogger outreach: you can spend all your budgeted time and money pursuing the top bloggers while constantly being blocked by content from bigger, sexier, richer, more impressive national and global brands that have exclusive content and truckloads of valuable review products, better assets, and a promise of more and better traffic resulting in higher advertising revenue.

The most obvious thing you can learn is how easily it is to get outbid. Another thing you’ll learn is that AdWords can rapidly burn all your cash with nothing to show for it. Finally, you’ll learn that Google doesn’t wage a fair fight — they both play favorites as well as giving preference to quality of ad over quantity of bid.

What this means in Google AdWords ads is that you’re rewarded for the following: 1) Having lots of cash: a fool and his money are soon parted 2) Finding new markets: Being willing to hunt out holes in the market — keyword combinations that are not so obvious but are hyper-targeted to appeal to a new segment of visitors, bringing new opportunities for Google to make money 3) Creating an irresistible ad: no matter how much money you’re willing to spend, Google doesn’t make money unless visitors are compelled to click through 4) Becoming a long-term client: there are many cases where no amount or money and wit will claim you the top ad position on Google search, inline with organic search, because that spot almost always goes to the client who has made Google the most money, historically, over time.

These lessons map perfectly to blogger outreach.

The blogosphere rewards specialization and laser-targeting

The most desired, desirable, and “easy” keywords are like the top bloggers with the highest Alltop rankings and Klout scores are constantly being pursued. How realistic are you that you can even compete with all the others vying for their time and copy? If you’re Dell or Sony, you probably have the sort of brand recognition and respect to be able to get a blogger to schedule time to review your new gizmo pretty thoroughly. You’ll probably also have the sort of marketing budget that would allow you to offer a review product to everyone you engage.

You’ll probably have a graphic design department and a staff of copywriters who can develop an amusing and compelling pitch which could include press junkets and personal meet and greets. Finally, a company like Dell is able to commit the long-term time, staff, and expense account towards making sure their communications team developed and professional as well as personal relationship with as many online influencers and online journalists over time — to use Google AdWords parlance, they have learned how to appeal to Google on all levels.

How many levels are you able to compete on? If you’re unable to compete on any of these levels, you’ll go bankrupt trying. It’s not that A-List tech bloggers are corrupt, it’s just that they’re under pressure as well. They have only 24-hours/day and they’re heavily rewarded with traffic when they’re able to get exclusive content from a national player such as Dell. In the same way that Google AdWords rewards its clients for trying harder and digging deeper into the “long tail” in order to find new, under-served, markets, the blogosphere also rewards specialization and laser-targeting.

In a perfect world, one should only spend one’s AdWords budget on keywords phrases that display ads only to people who will convert into clients and customers. The better one knows one’s market and customer and the more time one spends finding out who and where they are and engaging them there, the more value you can extract from your sweat and cash.

Let’s say you’re preparing to launch your new book online and you want to use bloggers as an essential distribution channel, both great ideas. However, let’s think this through. Are you internationally famous crime fiction writer James Ellroy or are you an unknown first-time, self-published, crime fiction-writer? Do you have a huge war chest to fuel your promotional campaign or are you running on sweat equity? Do you have thousands of friends online who are already committed to buying your book because you have been developing your popularity online by sharing chapters and answering questions and giving free advice or have you been busily scribbling your work on yellow pads and consider your work protected by strict copyright and not something to dilute by giving it away?

Novice Google AdWords users waste a lot of money with limited results when they start out because they don’t understand how the competition works in contextual ad-buying: It’s an auction. A complicated auction.

In short, the way it works is that every keyword combination, such as “social media marketing,” competes with four things: the general popularity of the search, the quality of the keyword ad, the long-term success of the campaign, and how much money others are willing to bid for their ad based on their keyword choice, also dependent on their prior successes, ad spends, and long-term commitment. In shorter, while how much you’re willing to bid for a keyword phrase is important, it isn’t that simple.

With blogger outreach, you face the same odds as for paid search. If you are targeting only the top blogs, you’ll face immense competition and can easily be outgunned by bigger foes. If you target the long tail of bloggers, you can more easily land your targets and will build up success one blog at a time, rather than in one fell swoop.

The post The Long Tail strategy for AdWords works for blogger outreach appeared first on Inside Social Media.

Last week, I talked about using the long tail of blogger outreach — the idea that you can’t pin your hopes for most public relations efforts on only the A-list bloggers. For each outreach, there are hundreds and often thousands of bloggers that are not well-known but have influence on the very people that your PR campaign is trying to reach.

I’ve written in the past about how to put bloggers first when you reach out to them, but today I want to make sure that you don’t see blogger outreach as a one-time, campaign-oriented approach but rather a relationship that lasts for years between you and each blogger. For blogger outreach to work on an ongoing basis, you need to be endlessly generous and endlessly appreciative. And the main way that you show your appreciation is to do as much of the work for them as possible.

You need to make sure you’ve set up the pitch and the campaign. Your message must be essential and clear enough that each blogger can potentially go from reading the email pitch to clicking the post button on their blog well within five minutes. Any more and we maybe get only a tweet or a Facebook Like.

We need to be clear in our email that we want a post and the pitch to be shared with the readers of the blog. In our social media news releases, we need to make sure that everything can be copied and pasted as-is, that images are the correct size, that the links are already embedded, that copy and text is simple to copy and block-quote and that any and all banner ads or videos have a handy and easy to find embed code right there.

One cannot assume any technical proficiency, one cannot assume any PR or communications experience, one cannot assume that any blogger knows any PR-speak or knows how to deal with an embargo. One cannot assume that anyone knows what a press release is, or a social media release or what PRWeb is or, heaven forbid, how to keep an embargoed message holy. Long story short, if the message in any way seems more complicated or time-consuming than each blogger fancies it’s worth, then you’ve lost them.

Authenticity vs. robot armies rife with affiliate links

I get why folks have spent many millions of dollars creating a robot army of sites and links and posts that emulate a passionate blogosphere. A robot army rife with affiliate links is really much more manageable to control freaks who need to make sure they can predict ROI based on investment. This is probably the direct result of VC-funding. Those guys love seeing money in and money out. But it isn’t authentic and it isn’t real and these castles of cards are also vulnerable as we have been recently seeing as Google goes through revisions of its search algorithm, oftentimes removing or de-prioritizing entire portions of the Internet that have been produced at great expense to emulate the vigorous and organic, self-organizing, engaged citizenry.

I won’t lie to you, having hundreds of earned media mentions as the result of a very real digital PR long-tail blogger outreach to thousands of bloggers can be SEO gold. Some clients retain us yearly and we can turn those hundreds of posts to thousands of posts per year. The powerful secondary effect of the earnest PR earned-media campaign is SEO link juice, something we didn’t sort out until we were doing this for a couple of years.

Having hundreds of thousands of prepared keyword strings and copy and images and videos pointing back to our clients results in a white-hat link-farm effect, if you will, with one caveat: It is real. We don’t pay these bloggers to write. None of these bloggers are on the same server or the same node or the same cloud or in the same network. The vigilant army of real live Google site investigators can scrutinize these hundreds of posts with a fine tooth comb and there’s no harm and no foul.

At the end of the day, we’re not creating a fallacy world of content used to drive revenue much like an elaborate marketing theme park. What we’re trying to do is play the game of “olly olly oxen free” with the denizens of the Internet. We’re ringing the dinner gong. We’re giving lots and lots of people who have a worthy platform for self-expression an opportunity to write about something if, and only if, our email pitch resonates with them or, to be honest, they’re impressed that our client has taken the time to reach out to them directly, asking them for a favor.

When it comes to the empowered and powerful A-listers, they’ve been pitched a million times by the world’s top brands. In fact, companies and their agencies are falling all over themselves to appeal to these powerful few. Not much further along the tail, there are loads of blogs and bloggers who have never been kissed at all, never been pitched by a noted brand, never been engaged by a social media team or PR agent, have never received an offer to pass on to their readers or received a book to review, have never received super-super concierge service and follow up.

In so many cases, we’re their first. We’re their very first PR kiss and, as you know, nobody forgets their first.

Image at top by friendlydrag0n on Flickr

The post Real bloggers and real blogs always trump Robot Armies appeared first on Inside Social Media.