Inbound Marketing and SEO: Insights from the Moz Blog

Part IV: OUTREACH

By Paddy Moogan

You can have the best content on the web, but if no one ever reads it, it's useless. If you have a large, established website with an existing community or readership, it is possible that your content will be read and shared without much work from you. For the majority of websites, however, content will need to be promoted before anyone will read or share it. Content sometimes needs that push to give it the attention it deserves. This is where outreach comes in.

Why Outreach Is Important

Outreach can help give your website the exposure that it needs in order to thrive. In an ideal world, your audience would just be able to find and engage with your content naturally, and you wouldn't need any outreach. This is certainly possible; there are many products and companies that have succeeded online without having to think about outreach. However, this seems to be the exception rather than the rule, particularly as the web is becoming more competitive every day. It can also take a long time for promotion to happen naturally if you do not give your site that push it needs or dedicate time to getting the word out yourself, and instead rely only on word of mouth referrals to drive traffic and links.

You need to spend some time thinking about whom you should be promoting your content to, and how you are going to get their attention. This is the very first stage of outreach— thinking about who might care enough about your content to share it with their ...