Whether you’re a digital marketing agency, a modern legal firm, or an online pizza delivery service, you need to blog, or you won’t be able to attain the web presence you need to survive as a business. It helps to blog on your own site, but blogging for others (or finding others post cool stuff about you on their blog) will do more to bring in new traffic. Third party blogging is one of the most effective assets for anybody trying to market on the web. If you want to find people or websites who offer this service, you’re going to need to do some outreach.

I can do that myself, right?

The old fashioned way is to create a spreadsheet, research websites and writers, and start filling in your spreadsheet. You check off possibilities until you find some people who will write for you. Unfortunately, this method sucks up a ridiculous amount of time and resources.

“Blogger outreach tools” usually refers to software services that round up and organize information from blogs and bring it to your fingertips. GroupHigh is one of the industry leaders in blogger outreach, offering the single most comprehensive service that human brains can cook up. If you don’t want to waste away plugging info into an Excel file, this may be the relief you’re looking for.

How does this work, anyway?

Say you’re a fashion company that makes sweaters for people with long arms (bear with me, it’s funny and educational). You have a website with a blog, but you want to post articles on other sites and get some links out there. You set up a GroupHigh account and run a keyword search in their database.

Similar to Google, you can add parameters to eliminate certain types of results, while making others significantly more prominent. For instance, I could put in “fashion” and “long arms.” Then, I put in “+sweaters,” because I want to mostly find blogs about that article of clothing. Finally, I type “-long legs,” because that’s definitely not our thing. Basically “+” means you want the keyword to significantly show up in your results, and “-” means you do not. See, easy.

Boom! We now have a bunch of blogs to choose from that can post about our awesome business. Even that very specific query turned up over 60,000 blogs to choose from that fit my particular niche clientele.

You can organize these results by a number of criteria and then create your own lists based on your needs. GroupHigh also lets you email people through its browser client, with customizable templates. Although the mail feature is designed to work with Gmail, you can link it to whatever service your business uses. The email will create a notification in GroupHigh so that your team can keep track of who has contacted whom and when.

Get ready for a knowledge feast!

The results also offer incredible detail. You’ll know what keywords come up with these sites, how well they do on social media (like Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, and Facebook), where they are from, and what are their most recent posts. That last feature is easily one of the coolest from the service. Even if you know the basic info about a site, seeing their most recent post titles is the fastest way to tell if your content is a fit.

GroupHigh also offers analytic integration, so you can see their traffic numbers and what kind of crowd they’re drawing. Their Alexa ranking is presented, as well as their MozRank. GroupHigh’s software is so fancy that you can also search by MozRank and SEO Metrics. Why is this so useful? Sure, you’d think that just giving you the best of the best is what search services do. But, if you’re a smaller company that needs to start somewhere, Forbes and Mashable look a little intimidating. GroupHigh gives users the option to find websites within their circle of influence (or price range).

What makes GroupHigh so cool?

There are other blogger outreach tools out there, and some of them do a decent enough job. However, a serious business won’t find an easier way to reach bloggers. For all those poor suckers that don’t take advantage of this tool, they will have a devil of a time hunting down info, especially phone numbers or emails. This is where GroupHigh shines.

Not only do they have over 13 million blog sites on catalog (that’s eight figures, folks), but they also have the most elegant method for acquiring contact info: crowdsourcing. Over 60 thousand contacts are updated every month by users. This is a much more efficient and comprehensive way to supply you with the means to reach third parties. No other outreach tool is making use of a system like this, so Kudos to GroupHigh for being downright awesome.

Nothing to lose!

If you don’t have a bazillion hours to waste on reading blogs and tracking down hard-to-find contact info, why not let the experts help you out? If you check out the website, they explain their services in detail. They even offer a free trial, so you can find out if they’re the right fit for your business. It’s software that saves you hours and dollars, and you know what that means: more time for knitting quality, long-armed winter wear.