In our previous lesson, we explained how to write an outreach email, with various case studies and examples. In this lesson, we’ll take a look at some of the best PR tools for doing manual outreach for link building.
Quick Recap: What is Manual or Blogger Outreach?
Manual outreach is the process of building relationships and promoting your article, product or business to other bloggers, journalists and businesses. This helps achieve brand awareness, backlinks and brand citations.
What are the Best Tools for Manual PR Outreach?
1. Buzzstream.com
Buzzstream.com (from $29.99/month) is a PR and link building tool that helps simplify, improve and manage the entire outreach process from start to finish. It is used in-house by literally thousands of SEO and content outreach agencies.
Once you’ve purchased Buzzstream.com, you’ll be able to search for relevant outreach targets in your niche or import a list of URLs (from a backlink tool) in CSV format. You can also pin websites to your Buzzstream account whilst browsing the web.
Buzzstream will automatically find the contact details for that website and display important features such as the Page Rank, inbound links and MozRank of the site (based on data from Moz.com).
You can contact all websites via email or Twitter from within the system itself (a huge time saver), which also reports on the status of your communications. You can also use preset emails for your outreach, which can save you a great deal of time.
2. Muckrack.com
Muckrack.com (from $99/month) is another outreach tool that allows you to target individual journalists and bloggers in your industry. Unlike Buzzstream.com, it focuses on finding individual bloggers and journalists as opposed to websites. Thus, it’s more useful for media PR as opposed to contacting websites for guest posts.
The tool helps find individual contacts by searching websites/Twitter streams and showing authors who have written on your chosen topic.
Once you select a journalist or blogger, you’ll be able to see author bio information about them and contact them through Twitter or email (if they have this option enabled).
The large downside to Muckrack.com is the high price and the limited number of database contacts in certain industries. For example, if you work in igaming there are very few contacts in their database. Secondly, the search functionality of the tool can be a little off. For example, if an author mentions a specific word just once in their article then it will come up in the author search. This of course doesn’t mean they write extensively on that subject.
3. Buzzsumo.com
Buzzsumo.com is a free tool that helps you to find key influencers in a topic or industry.
In order to use the tool, simply click on “Influencers” above the search box and then enter your topic or industry. Buzzsumo.com displays useful information about the key influences including their URL, page rank, number of followers, retweet ratio, reply ratio and more. You can also sort the results using any of the Above.
This tool is useful because it allows you to add influencers to your own list or Tweet them without leaving the website.
4. HARO and ResponseSource.com
HARO (Help a Reporter Out) and ResponseSource.com are similar tools that allow you to receive email pitches for interviews, spokespeople or experts in a certain industry.
The advantage of HARO is that it’s free to sign up using a single email account and you can narrow the types of queries you receive based on industry or keyword. The downside is that it’s only US-focused.
ResponseSource.com is a more expensive option (£300+ per year for each industry) however it contains far more daily email queries and is great for the UK businesses. It regularly features email enquiries from the BBC, Huffington Post, The Mirror, OK magazine and many others.
5. FollowUp.cc
FollowUp.cc ($4/month) is a relatively useful tool that helps organize your emails and set reminders for outreach.
Every time you send an outreach email, simply cc the email to @followup.cc and it will send you a reminder based on the timeline that you required (e.g. 30 mins, 1 week, 1 month).
There’s nothing exceptional about this tool but if you’re sending hundreds of emails at once than it helps to keep on top of them all.