Link building and content marketing have been all the craze in the battle for search position and brand awareness. The driving force behind both of those strategies truly has to do with building relationships between your business and people or organizations that are relevant to your cause. In order to create an effective online marketing strategy you need to invest in outreach.

Outreach almost speaks for itself in that you are literally reaching out to individuals and businesses in order to gain access to websites and build authority on certain subject matter as a source of credibility online and within your industry.

Learn How To Pitch

Proving that you’re not some spam bot by taking the time to reach out with a humanized approach toward initiating contact works extremely well. This can happen through a number of ways, but the most common is e-mail. However, before you start sending out random gibberish about why they should include a link to your website on their online profile, take the time to get to know the individual or business you’re reaching out to. There are so many bloggers and start-ups out there not willing to put in the time or energy to work up a good first contact, and this can lead to some pretty fast rejection. For a few tips on how you can create a worthwhile pitch, here is a list of my top 5 favorite posts:

1. Bill Sebald of Search Engine Journal Breaks Down The Pitch
2. Kerin Foster of Search Engine Land Instructs Not To Pitch Too Hard
3. Garrett French of Search Engine Watch Proposes A Trade
4. Matt Polsky of www.mattpolsky.com Gives A Few Examples
5. Thomas McMahon of Biznology Suggests Avoiding Stock E-mails

Although a lot can be said for traditional outreach methods, as the technological world continues to advance, so do the methods being used to link key players within this industry. In order to sell yourself and your business you must be persuasive in promoting the content that you publish on your website, and unfortunately, this can’t always be accomplished through email. For this reason, there are other outlets that can be beneficial in helping you establish yourself ranging from offline resources to social media marketing. For a more in depth glance into how you can improve your outreach skills, read on below.

6. Andrew Dennis of Linkarati Talks Social Media
7. Jason Acidre of Kaiser The Sage Gives A List Of Strategies
8. Razvan Gavrilaz of Cognitive SEO Provides Cutting Edge SEO Tools
9. Manish Dudharejia of E2M Solutions Explains Broken Link Advantages
10. Chris Dyson of Triple SEO Speaks About Blogger Outreach

Outreach Assistance

Even the most together marketer needs a little help getting their concepts going, which can lead to a panicked search for outreach tools. Fortunately, there are plenty of great new resources popping up across the internet. Below you will find a list of 5 of the top outreach assistance tools that will help you identify industry leaders as well as trending topics:

11. Tout App: Tout App provides features such as templates, shared templates, scheduled e-mails, email analytics, and more.
12. Rapportive: This tool gives you the ability to see each contact’s personalized info inside of your inbox, instead of filling it with Gmail ads.
13. Buzzstream: Buzzstream eliminates wasted time by implementing link prospect research, list building, relationship management, response rate tracking, and templates into one tool.
14. Raven Tools: With free customer care support combined with Google integration, campaign management, custom branding, and various other features, Raven Tools offers plenty of aid to beginners in outreach.
15. Followerwonk: A Twitter based tool, Follwerwonk compares accounts, searches bios, contrasts relationships, and shares reports.

Back To Basics With E-Mail Outreach

Although e-mail outreach isn’t anything new to the expert marketer, it’s still one of the top tactics in the industry to connect and personalize your interaction with individuals and groups that you deem important to your company. E-mails allow you to give a voice and a digital face to your cause rather than just pitching a quick note over some sort of social media site. It may not be quite as personal as snail mail or a cold call, but it will get the message across if you know how to properly word your document. For tips and tricks from professionals on e-mail outreach, look into these web pages:

16. Zen Spill Gives some tips on creating a winning outreach e-mail in 4 simple steps.
17. Gregory Ciotti of Business Insider explains how you can get busy people to see your point.
18. Dana Forman of Seer Interactive gives perspective on good and bad outreach.
19. Jerry Silfwer of Doktor Spinn references some “how to” knowledge for outreach e-mails.
20. Nick Bernard of Portent focuses on brand.

These resources are a great jumping off point if you’re trying to hone your outreach skills, particularly in regards to link building. They may not give you everything you need to personalize your contacts, but they’ve certainly got some great information to get you going.