How We Turned Gryffin into a Powerful Blogger Outreach Platform

Blogger outreach has dozens of moving pieces. From selecting the right targets, tracking conversations, developing assets for publication, following up with potential site relationships, to promoting published articles… it’s a lot for marketers to track! Especially when most blogger outreach platforms only cover a piece or two of the much, much larger puzzle.

Designed by marketers, Gryffin is all about eliminating the pain points of managing work just like blogger outreach: work that is complex, multi-faceted, and multi-channel. Gryffin also has a wide variety of features meant to handle all the elements of blogger outreach in one place: from tracking emails to content creation, relationship management, and so on.

Here we’ll go through a step-by-step approach of creating an organized and pain-free campaign with Gryffin’s blogger outreach platform.

Before You Begin

Before you start your campaign, you’ll want to create an Outreach workspace in Gryffin, where you can track your efforts. A workspace is a collection of similar projects (in this case, blogs contacted), where you can track data, assign tasks (even automate workflows), and attach email conversations.

Fortunately, Gryffin already has as Outreach Workspace built for you! Go to Admin > Template Gallery, find the Outreach workspace and click on Install Workspace.

Blogger Outreach Platform

And voila! With a single click, you’ll have a functional workspace designed to facilitate every step of the outreach process.

Types of Blogger Outreach

Next, you’ll want to identify the type of outreach you’ll be using for a campaign. Some of the options are:

Guestographic

  • Guestographic: Offer an infographic and article that they can host on their site, with a link to your site as the source of the infographic, or in the body of the introductory article.

Freelance Writer

  • Freelance Writer: With this approach, you offer a free guest post in exchange for a link in the bio in order to build your reputation and gain visibility for yourself and/or your brand.

Resource Promotion

  • Resource Promotion: If you build a valuable asset, you can email sites that have mentioned similar resources in the past, and ask if they’ll include a link in their existing article to your asset.

Social Amplification

  • Social Amplification: With this approach, the “hook” is that if they add a link to your article on their site, you can share their link with your social media audience. Obviously, this only works if you have a large following of active followers.

Paid Promotion

  • Paid Promotion: If you have a budget to work with, ask people to add a link to your site on their site in exchange for payment. This would have to be disclosed to avoid issues with Google’s “paid links” filter. This is valuable when a site has lots of traffic and you can gain visitors from the placement.

Influencer Outreach

  • Influencer Outreach: This approach is targeted to help you find influencers to promote your brand.

Each outreach type will have a different approach for identifying and qualifying targets, as well as different pitch letters.

Crafting Your Pitch Letters

Each of the methods listed above will require a different type of pitch letter. In Gryffin’s Template Library, we have a Pitch Letter workspace with a large library of example pitch letters you can review and customize:

Blogger Outreach Platform

Here’s what it looks like when installed. You can take a look at the examples, or hit the Blogger Outreach Platform button to add your own letter to your new library:

Blogger Outreach Platform

Identify Potential Outreach Targets

Next, you’ll want to create a list of potential sites to contact. The easiest way to identify target sites is via Google, as the sites that show up on the top results are already considered authoritative.

You can use search operators to help you create a targeted list. Here’s a comprehensive guide fo Google search operators that we created to help you learn how to use search operators, as well as a list of the main search operators to consider.

For a small outreach campaign, you can add each individual prospect as a new project, and do follow-ups from there.

If you’re conducting large-scale outreach to hundreds of pages, it might be better to create a spreadsheet where you can add basic information, such as the…

  • URL
  • Contact info
  • Relevant site metrics (Moz DA, SEMrush rank, # of backlinks, etc.)

You can send out your pitches, and only create a project for those that respond, so you’re only tracking relevant and active contacts.

Time to Start Reaching Out!

Whichever method you choose, the next step is to start sending! Make sure you personalize the emails you send with any contact information you can find. These elements of personalization will help to improve your open and engagement rate.

If your personalization pays off and the site replies with interest, it’s “game on!”

Blogger Outreach Platform

Using Gryffin’s Blogger Outreach Platform

Two features, in particular, make Gryffin a great fit for blogger outreach:

Here’s how it works:

Create a Project from the Gryffin Inbox

When you integrate your inbox, you can see and send all emails right in Gryffin! Go to Inbox in the left menu, and you’ll see all incoming mail.

When you get a response from a target site, create a new project by clicking on the up arrow.

Blogger Outreach Platform

Next, you’ll want to click on “Create Project” and in the Workspace selector, search for your Outreach Workspace. A pop up will appear with the fields from that workspace.

Blogger Outreach Platform

From here, you can fill out any details for the project. Once done, hit Save!

Here’s what your project will look like:

Blogger Outreach Platform

Using the Outreach Workflow

The Outreach Workspace from the Template Library doesn’t just have a Outreach project template—it also has a ready-to-use Automated Workflow that will automatically generate tasks that will take you through the entire outreach process.

Each set of tasks are tied to a status, which are as follows:

Send Pitch

The first status is “Send Pitch”, where a task will be created for the project owner to send a more specific content pitch to the site.

Pitched

Was the pitch accepted? The project owner will see a task to review if there was a response. If the pitch was accepted, you can click on “Accept” in the task.

Blogger Outreach Platform

This will move you along to the next status, Needs Content. If the pitch was not accepted, click on “Reject” and the status will move back to “Send Pitch,” where you can repeat the pitching process as needed.

Needs Content

Once a pitch is approved, you can move to the content creation stage. This is relevant in the outreach styles where you have to send an article.

A task will be created for the project owner to provide instructions to the copywriter (the user added in the “Copywriter” field) so that they can create the necessary content that will match the client and the target site’s specifications.

Content In-Progress

Once instructions have been added and the task marked done, the assigned copywriter will now receive a direct task, Write Content for X site.

If you have connected your Gryffin company with your Google account, a Google document will be automatically created, where the writer can submit the content.

You can also add the target URL under “client inbound link” for the writer to incorporate into the article.

Content Under Review

When the writer completes the content, they will mark their task done, and a new task will be generated for the project lead to review and, if necessary, edit the article.

This is also an approval task, so the project owner can click on “Approve” or “Reject”. If the article is rejected, it will go to status “Content Edits in Progress” and the writer will receive a task to edit.

Blogger Outreach Platform

If it is approved, the next status is “Ready to Send”.

Ready to Send

Under this status, a task will be created to send the article to the website, including images, a link to your site, etc.

Content Sent

As soon as you send the article, and mark the “Send Content to Site” task done, a task will be created called “Content Accepted?” This task will be set for several days in the future, and serve as a reminder to check if the site accepts and publishes the content, or if you need to follow-up with them.

To be Published

Hopefully when the site accepts the article, you’ll be given a potential publication date. You can enter that publication date in the project, and the automated workflow will create a task for you to check that your site is published on that date.

Once the article is published, you can move on to the final stage, “Published.”

Published

Finally, you went through all those stages and your guest article was published, hooray! The final step is to create a task for yourself to pitch again in the future, maybe in 3-6 months so you can gain another link from this site.

After building a relationship, it’s ideal to maximize the connection!

There are three additional statuses:

Published; No Link: The article was published but your link was removed. If you go to this status, a task will be created for you to write to the site asking for the link.

Published: Pending Link: If you write to them, and they agree to add the link, you can use this status to create a task for yourself to review if the link was added, and follow up.

Rejected: If the article was rejected, you can archive the project for this site.

Customizing Your Outreach Workflow reach Tracker Workflow

If some steps of this workflow are not a fit for your company’s process… no problem!

It’s easy to edit your Workflow. You can also clone a Workflow, or create multiple Workflows with variations for different team members, clients, writers, types of outreach, etc!

Go to your workspace, open the menu in the top-right, and click on Configure Workspace.

Blogger Outreach Platform

Next, click on Workflows tab.

Blogger Outreach Platform

Select the workflow you’d like to change, and click on “Edit”.

Blogger Outreach Platform

From here, you can click on each status to change the status name, status type, and the task/tasks associated with that status.

Blogger Outreach Platform

By modifying the workflow, you can customize the process to match your team’s current approach and availability.

Associate Emails with Projects

Once you create a project for a website contact, all of your email communications should be associated with the project.

Within the project, you can go to inbox, and reply to emails from there, or create new ones:

Blogger Outreach Platform

If some of the emails that you typically send are repetitive, you can create templates for them.

Creating Email Templates

Click on “Compose” and click on the templates icon.

Blogger Outreach Platform

If you have any templates saved, they will appear here.

Blogger Outreach Platform

Or you can create a brand new one by clicking on “Manage Templates”:

Blogger Outreach Platform

Here you can enter the name and content of the template, and it’ll show up when you are composing emails and click on the templates icon.

Managing Your Tasks

For the process to be successful, it’s essential for you to track your tasks as they are created along the outreach process.

When you log on to Gryffin, you’ll see your tasks within your task dashboard.

Blogger Outreach Platform

Make sure you are checking your tasks frequently and marking them done so the workflows can continue moving forward.

Star Reaching Out!

Using Gryffin’s tools, you’ll have a systematic approach to implementing a blogger outreach process.

By combining emails, tasks, projects, and Google documents, you’ll have everything at your fingertips to unify and maintain the outreach process.

Blogger Outreach Platform

What are you waiting for? Create your Gryffin account, install the Outreach Tracker template, and you’re on your way to an increase in domain authority, traffic and sales!