Have you ever wanted to expand your content’s reach? Most content creators would, of course, say yes. Who wouldn’t want to try to get their content into a larger audience’s hands? However, anyone who has attempted it has likely realized that building online traffic is easier said than done. That said, a popular method for extending your writing’s reach is outreach content.
In summary, outreach content is the practice of creating large quantities of unique content for other sites and blogs. This gives these sites content and, with luck, gives you some of their traffic. However, it can also affect your SEO (or search engine optimization) by putting a focus on attracting viewership and sending it your way.
With this article, we’ll cover the following:
- Defining outreach content.
- How it can affect your SEO.
- Quality and quantity.
What is Outreach Content and Guest Posts?
If you’ve found this article, you probably already have an idea of what outreach content is. However, if you’re looking to expand your knowledge, here’s a more thorough run-through:
Essentially, outreach content and guest posting are the practices of creating content, usually written, for other media sources. You find websites and blogs that accept guest content, and you create high-quality work for them, usually with a link or some sort of trail back to your own content. This way, your clients get some high-quality content that you’ve given them on the subject, and you get some traffic from any of their audience that is interested in more of your writing.
This is great if you can find sites and blogs that are looking for content that you specialize in. Obviously, if you’re extremely experienced in writing about cars, you probably don’t want to offer to write content for a footwear fashion site. But if a site needs an article about automobiles, then you might just be able to supply them with the content they’re looking for. And as an added bonus, any of their audience that are interested in cars and like your writing might just be sent your way.
Typically, this whole process can get a bit overwhelming, particularly if you’re a single writer offering to make content for multiple different sites, which most people often do in order to maximize their outreach.
When the process becomes too much work for a single writer, it’s common for them to turn to experienced agencies. These agencies make the process much more manageable by connecting you to various clients looking for your writing. They can even take care of the writing itself by outsourcing the work to professional writing services, such as Captain Words.
These services are given examples of your style of writing that you want to supply the sites with and can create large quantities of high-quality content from experienced writers to supply to your outreach sites. You can even give instructions on where these articles should link and the best ways to naturally incorporate paths to your own personal content in order to lead the traffic your way.
How Outreach Content Affects and Boosts Your SEO
Outreach content has a careful balance to maintain. You obviously want to work with sites that have a high reputation, domain authority, and a broad audience. However, these sites have high renown in their field, and they’ll want to maintain that reputation by accepting only the best content that they can find. If you can meet that demand for high quality, the benefits are plentiful.
The higher the authority they have on the subject, the more sway they’ll have with their audience. Even the inclusion of a link from them will assure their audience that you’re trustworthy and worth checking out. The more their audience trusts them as a source, the more they’ll be willing to check out the links that they’re led to.
Not to mention, it’s not just your average reader looking to those sites. Other sources on the same subject actually look to those articles, especially guest posts, to find content that they’d want on their own sites. Get enough eyes on your work, and you’ll find that this outreach content can do some networking for you on your behalf. It’s not uncommon for high-quality content to attract the eyes of multiple sites from a single guest post. All it takes is one extraordinary article to pull attention from multiple different sources and find you even more interested clients.
Finally, there’s its direct effect on your content’s SEO. The more your content circulates, the more search engines will begin to recognize your writing. Plus, the more your links are clicked, visited, or sent around, the more likely it’ll become for search engines to suggest your site to users.
Outreach content thrusts you into the spotlight by circulating your content across the internet. That’s precisely what most search engines look for when trying to decide what is worth displaying to users.
The Advantages of Outreach SEO
As we said, outreach content is becoming a significantly popular way for content creators to get some traction. In an internet-dominated world, it seems like you can have a thousand competitors when writing about any given subject. Sometimes, an advantage like utilizing other sources’ traffic can be the secret to success.
What exactly can the SEO you get from outreach content do for you? While we’ve gone over some reasons, here’s a compiled list of why you might want to dip into the world of outreach content:
- Naturally expands your content’s reach.
- Uses the reputation of well-known websites to prove that you are a trusted creator.
- Circulates your content and links through different sources.
- Generates interest from multiple sites, making search engines more likely to recognize your content and personal links.
- Lets your content do the networking for you by finding interested clients with each article.
The Disadvantages of Outreach SEO
You’re probably wondering, if outreach content is so great, why isn’t everyone doing it? The truth is that not every content creator is capable of meeting the demands of outreach and guest posting. It’s not a task for an individual; it’s a task for a team.
There are, unfortunately, a few disadvantages and barriers to entry when it comes to this kind of content.
High Requirements
The first is the requirements expected of guest posts. Like we said, it’s wise to look for sites with a high reputation. But this also means they will be expecting you to uphold that reputation. As such, they will likely have a lengthy list of criteria that they will expect your content to meet. If you’re an expert in the subject, this shouldn’t be too much of an issue. However, if you’ve got eight different articles to finish for five different clients, it can start to become time-consuming and draining.
Suspicious Sites
On the other side of things, there’s always the risk of a site not being quite as trustworthy as you first thought. Creating content for these sites can have dire consequences. Not only will it damage your domain authority, but it can also create a stain on your reputation by being associated with these sources.
That can drive away viewers and search engine algorithms alike. Be careful who you decide to write for, and look into them a bit before making any final agreements.
Competition
While outreach content can take a while to deliver results, don’t underestimate your competitors. You will likely face fierce competition from similar guest post writers, eager to get their content into the hands of trustworthy sites. The only way you can ensure that sites will want to choose you is by showing them that you can deliver high quality content consistently. Let your content speak for you.
Time Consumption
And now, for the big one: time consumption. Outreach content can devour your free time as a sole writer. While it might be tempting to find four, five, even a dozen different sites to write for, keep in mind that they will likely all want unique, high-quality content. You can’t just write a single article and bring it to ten different websites and expect the best. Each of your clients will want personal content created specifically for them.
This can be quite an issue for a single writer. That is essentially hours upon hours of writing for each client, especially dependent on the size and quality of the article they’re looking for. Sure, you’ll save time spent on research if all of the articles are of a similar subject and within your expertise, but it will still end up taking you hours purely in time spent putting pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard).
However, the way to alleviate this is simple. Professional writing teams. Services like Captain Words offer professional outreach content teams that you can scale to any size of project that you need. You can give examples of your content style, give requirements of the content, and set constraints and suggestions for the articles. This way, you can focus on things like finding trustworthy clients and working on your own content.
Quality Is Critical for Content Outreach
While quantity may be the name of the game when it comes to getting your content published, at the end of the day, it’s quality that will determine your success. This is why it’s so difficult for a single writer to maintain a schedule of regularly creating outsourced content. You can’t sacrifice quality for the sake of reaching more clients.
The solution, as we said, is writing teams. These teams work with a combination of professional writers as well as subject experts that specialize in various topics. They have plenty of research under their belt, meaning that you can give these teams the briefing of the kind of content you need, and you will receive high-quality expert content in return.
These teams can scale with the amount of unique content you’re looking for, so you’ll no longer run into the issue of having to choose between expanding your reach and spending another few sleepless hours trying to get your first client’s article finished.
Teams like Captain Words can deliver content that will interest readers and attract them to your links, as well as being able to appease search engine algorithms with the help of SEO experts. These teams are equipped with all the resources required to optimize your content for viewership, leading traffic, and appeasing all the criteria required, both from clients and search engines.
Conclusion
As you can see, outreach content can be a bit of a hassle to manage. However, the benefits are absolutely worth it in the long run, and the drawbacks can be avoided if you are willing to delegate content to professional teams. Have you considered outreaching content of your own? Are you looking for a team of writers to help you expand your content output? Find out how we can help you with our expert content services.
