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The following post will highlight 15 essential tools for anyone involved in Blogger outreach. These tools will help you not only keep track of your progress, but also increase your productivity.

Blogger outreach is a great way to find influencers for your products. It’s also essential in guest blogging, which has become a popular link building strategy.

Here is a list with both paid and free blogger outreach tools. This will help you make the most out of your time, and find more bloggers to connect with.

This list is by no means complete. New tools appear all the time. Some disappear, while others can be complicated or limit results. These tools are very popular in our house because of their simplicity and ability to maximize results.

No cost for Blogger Outreach or Guest Posting

1. SEO Moz Toolbar – MozBar

MozBar, a great SEO toolbar for Chrome and Firefox, is available. You will find helpful metrics such as Page Authority, Domain Authority and many others.

You can also use nofollow highlighting, links to traffic data sites like Quantcast, Alexa, Compete and Quantcast as well as many other features. You can also open Back Tweets and other cool stuff.

This is why I included it as a tool for blogger outreach. You need to build a list of blogs before you can reach them.

This toolbar is useful for link prospecting because of a few reasons:

First, you can obtain a SERP overlay for Domain Authority and Page Authority. This can be useful for quality checking.

The Firefox version of MozBar allows you to export search engine results pages (SERPs) to a CSV file. This can be used in conjunction with the SEO Gadget bulk analytical tool, which is also mentioned.

2. Buzz Stream Free Tools

Buzz Stream is a great tool. I find it extremely useful and time-saving.

Total 7 tools are available, which includes –

• Email Research Tool This will generate search queries that will help you find the contact details of bloggers to which you wish to reach.
• Link building query engine – When you are doing blogger outreach, you will need advanced search operators to help you find blogs quickly. This tool does just that.
• Extract domain URL This tool is useful if you have some SERPs exported to a CSV. If you find that you have a list with deep links, rather than root domains, this tool will save you a lot.
• Extract descriptive content from a URL This tool is great if you have many URLs or links to articles that you need to narrow down and see what the articles are talking most about.
• Extract links – Imagine someone has a large list of websites and blogs they want to contact, but there are many characters and bits of information in the way. You just want the links. This tool will help you save a lot of time.
• Create Outreach lists using blogrolls is another useful tool that will save you time and help you build your prospect list.
• Extract page title and description from URLs. I don’t think this is useful for blogger outreach, but it does give me an easy way to see which keywords my competitors are using en masse.

3. Spreadsheets – Google Docs/Drive

When I first began blogger outreach, I used Excel spreadsheets. But as we grew our team and realized the value of collaboration, we realized that we needed something more.

We switched to Spreadsheets on Google Doc’s, which eliminated a lot of headaches. Multiple team members could now access the same document simultaneously without data loss.

Spreadsheets on Google Docs are great for anyone who doesn’t work in a team. You can access them remotely from your phone or tablet, but they have limited functionality.

4. Gmail Canned Replies

Gmail Labs’ Canned Responses tool can help you increase productivity and make it easier to create email templates.

This is a great tool to use for initial responses as well as for initial approaches. You should tailor your templates wherever possible. Include a section in your template to add something to the blogger that you are reaching out to. Make sure it’s clearly stated in the template.

Simply choose a name for your template and save it. Then, all you need is to compose a message and select your template.

Labs is easy to use if you are new to it. Simply navigate to your Google Mail settings and click on the Labs tab. Search for Canned Responses.

5. SEO Gadget bulk analysis tool

This amazing tool will give you tons of information. It will help you be more informed about blogs you are interested in reaching out to. It will also save you time.

You will need a list with URLs for your blogs before you can start. Once you have this list, you can fire it into the tool to get a massive report. This report includes IP address, WHOIS mail, contact page, contact email and Twitter profile.

6. FollowUp.CC

Follow ups are a crucial part of the blogger outreach process, or for any email correspondence.

FollowUp.CC makes it easy to follow-up by allowing you to send FollowUp.CC a customized email address which will allow you to determine when you should be reminded. For example, [email protected].

Another great thing about this tool is the way it pulls the relevant conversions to your top mail box (although this can only be used with a conversation-based email service such as Gmail).

7. Majestic SEO Chrome Toolbar

Although this tool isn’t designed specifically for blogger outreach, it can be used in the prospecting phase. Majestic SEO’s metrics Citation Flow (and Trust Flow) are my favorites.

Quality checking websites is a difficult part of any blogger outreach campaign. You need to ask yourself if you want to be featured or if they want to link to you.

A few things can set off alarm bells. One of them is unusually optimised anchor text. Click the tab to instantly see if something is wrong.

It is also worth looking at who links to your website. This can be done with the Majestic SEO Toolbar.

Paid Blogger Outreach and Guest Publishing Tools

8. InkyBee

This is a new tool, which I have been testing for the past few weeks. It’s currently in beta (pricing to change soon).

This tool’s strength lies in its ability to find lists of blogs. All you have to do is start a discovery task and add 3 keywords or topics. The tool will then search for blogs that include the keywords/topics on one page, and add them to your list.

After InkyBee has discovered blogs, you can go in and choose which blogs you wish to add to your blog list. You can also rank them in order of relevancy and audience size.

Once you have added the blogs that you wish to contact to your main list, you will have access to information such as audience size, engagement, posts per day, days since last posting, and even a button that scans for any social media accounts. This is a great tool to help you prioritize which blogs to contact.

This data can be exported to Excel, CSV, or PDF to be used in other tools or archived if you wish.

InkyBee has many features in development and I’m excited to see what they do in the future. This is the best outreach tool right now.

9. Wordtracker’s link builder

This solid tool is by Ken McGaffin, who is a man that knows his stuff. You can use it for prospecting and maintaining contacts as well as analysing your backlink profile.

Start a new campaign by adding your keywords, competitors, and customizing any settings.

The list will be large enough that you can filter them with many settings, including strategies, types of sites and other factors.

Once you have decided who you want, you can add contact data, notes, and even check for link placement.

10. Citation Labs Link Prospector

Garrett French and Whitespark.ca created the Link Prospector. It is a tool that helps you find linking opportunities.

You can choose your region, blog results, depth of search and TLD. Add safe search filters to add sites you don’t want to include at either a campaign or global level.

This is where the tool really shines. There’s a report type that you can choose from, and as you might expect, there’s a report type for guest posting. But there are also content promoters, links pages and content promoters. Reviews, donations, giveaways, and much more.

After you have customized all campaign settings, add your keywords and search phrases to the report.

Then, you can export your reports only with the domains or specific URLs.

11. Buzz Stream

Buzz Stream is a great tool that makes my job at UK Linkology much easier. I don’t have the worry of losing data or monitoring links.

Buzz Stream is a great tool for bloggers, regardless of whether you are using it to promote your blog via link building or PR.

Start by using the built-in link prospecting tools, then import them to your project.

Buzz Stream allows you to enter your email address and create templates, which can really help productivity.

You can email the prospect using the interface to see a complete history of your interactions with them. There are also notes and other notes. The RSS feed pulls in all their latest content as well as a bunch domain metrics.

Once you have a published link, you can quickly add it to your browser bookmarklet. Buzz Stream will monitor your links and check them every other week. You also have the option of running reports.

You can also add social mentions to the list and use the task management system to manage teams.

It is amazing to see the progress made by Buzz Stream and the support that continues.

12. Raven Tools

Raven Tools offers more than just a link monitoring and outreach management tool. You also get reporting, task management, PPC management, research, social media management, and reporting.

Blogger outreach can be done by first finding potential prospects using the site finder tool, then adding them to the outreach management CRM. Next, locate contact details, send emails, and track published links.

13. Follower Wonk

Instead of starting by prospecting blogs with search operators and regular prospecting tools, why not start looking for authority and influential people in your industry?

Remember that blogger outreach is not limited to email. However, if you know who you are and have already built up a relationship with the blogger, it will be difficult for them to decline your pitch.

Follower Wonk makes it easy to identify influencers and authority figures in your industry. You can search using keywords, then analyse and track the followers.

Another benefit of this tool? It highlights when and where your followers tweet. This will help you find the best times to reach your followers and other users on Twitter.

14. SEM Rush

You might have heard of SEM Rush, and wondered why it was included in this list. It’s not a good tool for guest posting or blogger outreach.

SEM Rush provides incredible data for research purposes, but it is also great for keyword research and competitive research.

You must be able to prioritize your targets and concentrate your efforts on getting the content on the right sites. This is why I recommend SEM Rush.

Let’s imagine that you are trying to promote your product via blogger outreach, guest posting, or offering your product/service for review.

Although it’s a costly process, the effort put into it is worth the return. But what if a site appears great but receives no traffic after a recent algo update?

Is it worth taking the chance?

No!

This brings me back to SEM Rush. It can quickly identify if a website has taken a pasting. I’m sure the database doesn’t always match 100%, but I don’t know of a tool that can (we can always hope though).

15. Link Research Tools

Similar to SEM Rush but not a tool for guest posting or blogger outreach, this tool is great for SEOs and has some powerful metrics.

LRT (Link Research Tools), comes with a few tools you’ll find very useful for blogger outreach.

• Contact Finder This is an extremely powerful tool which will pull all the contact details of a website and its authors, making it easy to connect with them.
• Backlink profiler This tool pulls in all back links from a website and breaks them down according to site type (I.E. Blogs, directories, social media networks, etc. and then provides a breakdown of the anchor text.
• Link juice Tool – This tool will tell you which websites are most valuable for SEO purposes, but I think there are more important factors such as audience size and engagement.
• Link alerts – Knowing which links are coming to your site is crucial in order to highlight problems and the success of your campaigns. You’ll see not only the links coming from guest posts you’ve published, but also any earned links you have gotten through blogger outreach/guest posting.

Summary

These are 15 tools you can use to promote your blog and guest posting campaigns. There are a few extras that you might not have thought of.

There are many tools available, whether paid or free. But this is not an exhaustive list. The question is: What do you have in your blogger outreach/guest post toolkit?