Raise your hand if you have a love-hate relationship with outreach. I’ll go first…🙋‍♂️

Let’s face it. Outreach is frustrating, time-consuming, and, honestly, boring. And when you are just getting started, it can feel like you are looking for a needle in a haystack.

Yet, it’s critical to so many facets of marketing. And as much as you want to punt it to the bottom of your to-do list, it’ll continue to light up like a neon sign on your monthly task list.

From link building to influencer marketing, outreach isn’t going anywhere. Thankfully, a handful of blogger outreach tools make this task slightly less painful.

As with any other marketing tool, there are a lot of unruly weeds to filter through to find the right blogger outreach tool for your needs.

But today is your lucky day. I’ve done the hard work for you (so you don’t have to) by testing and ranking the best blogger outreach tools.

Insert a round of applause. You’re welcome. More rounds of applause.

Ok, enough is enough. I promised you the best blogger outreach tools (and which ones to avoid), so here’s a curated list of tools to add to your marketing arsenal ASAP.

And the last one might surprise you, but no peeking.

Real quick, before we dive in…

Why blogging outreach is so important

Here are some stats on blogging outreach that might surprise you. 

• 50% of bloggers perform outreach for guest posts to 10 or fewer contacts a month, while 7% of them pitch to 100 or more blogs per month
• 70% of bloggers who earn over $50,000 per year say they’re active or very active promoters of their blogs, compared to only 14% of lower-income bloggers
• Bloggers who earn over $50,000 per year from their blogs are over twice as likely to focus on getting email subscribers compared to lower-income bloggers. They also use 343% as many email-collection methods as lower-income bloggers

See a trend? 

Top-earning bloggers do a ton of outreach. But it’s not just about quantity. It’s about quality. And efficiency. Nobody’s got time to do outreach all day, every day.

So, without further ado, here are the top outreach tools to streamline your workflow and maximize your results. 

1. BuzzStream

BuzzStream is a tool that helps individuals and businesses manage their online relationships and content promotion efforts.

Digital marketing agencies, public relations firms, and content creators covet this tool. BuzzStream helps streamline outreach by making tracking and managing relationships with influencers, bloggers, and other contacts easier.

BuzzStream is, without a doubt, one of the secret sauces to a successful link building outreach campaign.

Main Features:

• Research prospects: Easily create targeted prospect lists, add new contacts, and automatically gather contact information and metrics. Streamline your work by building comprehensive profiles and spending less time on spreadsheets.
• Build automatic lists: Save time and effort on research with the automatic prospecting feature. This tool quickly gathers the most relevant results from web and SERP searches to build your outreach list in seconds.
• Emailing made easy: Send personalized, trackable emails to your prospects by scheduling and sending automated follow-up emails. Paid plans include access to email templates, setting up email drip campaigns, and tracking and managing email conversations within the platform.
• Manage campaigns with a bird’s eye view: Stay up-to-date on the progress of your campaign with the instant overview feature. See which prospects you’ve already contacted, who’s on board to participate, and who you still need to connect with.
• Access to detailed reports: Improve the effectiveness of your blogger outreach strategy by viewing insights by email template and subject line. The platform shows you which ones get the best responses so that you can make informed decisions about your outreach strategy.

Price: BuzzStream offers four different pricing plans: Starter $24/month, Growth $124/month, Professional $299/month, and Custom $999/month. The first three tiers offer a 14-day free trial.

Who should use it: BuzzStream is the perfect outreach tool for SEO link building and digital PR if you want to land some of the best links on the internet. Think of it like a blogger outreach service.

2. Hunter

Hunter is a tool that helps you find email addresses and other contact information for literally anyone at an organization.

It’s my go-to tool when searching for email addresses associated with a specific domain or website or trying to find contact information for a specific individual.

It also provides tools for verifying email addresses, tracking email opens and clicks, and managing your outreach efforts.

Main Features:

• Email search: Allows you to search for email addresses by domain, company name, or individual name, using various search filters and options.
• Email verification: Verifies the accuracy and deliverability of email addresses, helping you ensure that your emails reach their intended recipients.
• Domain search: This enables you to search for email addresses by domain, allowing you to find all the email addresses associated with a particular website or company.
• Contact management: Offers tools for managing and organizing contact lists, including the ability to import and export lists, add tags and notes, and create custom fields.

Price: Hunter offers various pricing plans, from a free account to a full-blown business plan starting at $349/month.

Who should use it: Anyone. You can use Hunter to land a job interview or score a guest post feature. If you are looking for someone’s email address, Hunter is the go-to email finder tool.

I love using Hunter and LinkedIn in tandem. They go together like peanut butter and jelly. I use LinkedIn as my database to find specific names for roles within an organization, and then I jump over to Hunter to find and confirm email addresses.

Let’s take a look at an example in action.

I had a niche site reach out to me, seeking advice on getting accepted to the Wayfair affiliate program. Their application on the generic affiliate platform had been pending for months without any progress.

They were ranking #1 on Google for the keyword “mid-century modern dining tables,” bringing in thousands of visitors per day without access to an affiliate program (read: missing out on material commissions).

So I went straight to Wayfair’s LinkedIn page and searched for “affiliate” in the keyword box.

That gave me 25 employee names to choose from. Then I dropped all those names into Hunter, found their email addresses, and within 48 hours, the application got approved, and affiliate commissions started flooding in.

Talk about a success story! This combination of tools is a must-have in your outreach process. Trust me, it works.

Hunter helps you build and maintain accurate and effective email lists and makes it easier to find and connect with the people and businesses you want to reach.

3. Pitchbox

Pitchbox is a comprehensive tool that helps you manage and streamline your influencer outreach campaigns, including link building and content promotion.

It provides all the necessary features to keep you organized, build more high-quality links, and achieve your SEO goals.

Main Features:

• Contact discovery: Find the contact information for an influential blogger, webmaster, or social media influencer in minutes and with virtually no effort.
• SEO tool integration: Do you already use other SEO tools like Ahrefs, Semrush, Majestic, or Moz? With Pitchbox’s integrations, you can access this valuable data to help you improve your outreach and link building efforts.
• Smart technology: Pitchbox guarantees their outreach campaigns will have superior deliverability and response rates. The combination of SmartTemplates™, email sequencing, Natural Sending Patterns™ (NSP), and personalization on the platform sets them apart.
• SEO CRM: Keep your eyes on all your link outreach efforts with an SEO CRM to provide a one-stop shop for SEO metrics, link data, and email communications.
• Link monitoring: Stay informed of any critical changes to your backlinks and ensure you don’t miss out on important link equity by automatically tracking them over time.

Price: Pitchbox offers two tiers of pricing plans: Professional starting at $495/month and Enterprise starting at $1350/month.

Who should use it: There’s no doubt about it. Link builders designed Pitchbox specifically with other link builders in mind. Never miss out on link building opportunities again with the help of Pitchbox.

4. Upfluence

Upfluence is a platform that helps businesses and organizations connect with influencers and content creators for marketing and promotional purposes.

This platform has various tools and features for finding, organizing, and working with influencers. It also tracks and measures the success of influencer marketing campaigns.

Main Features:

• Influencer search: Allows you to search for influencers and content creators based on various criteria, such as location, topic, audience size, and engagement rate.
• Campaign management: Offers tools for managing and organizing influencer marketing campaigns, including the ability to create and send pitches, track responses and replies, and schedule and publish content.
• Relationship management: Stay on top of relationships with influencers and content creators, including the ability to add notes and tags, set reminders, and track interactions and engagement.
• Analytics and reporting: Get insight into analytics to measure the performance of your influencer marketing campaigns, including the ability to track the reach and engagement of influencer content.

Price: Upfluence offers a free Chrome extension, but for access to the best features, you’ll find a paywall with three tiers (Growth, Scale, Enterprise). One user reports paying $795 per user per month.

Who should use it: Upfluence helps businesses and organizations find, connect, and collaborate with influencers and content creators. If you’re looking to find the perfect influencer for your niche, Upfluence is your tool.

5. Respona

Response is a platform that helps businesses and organizations streamline and optimize their digital PR and content marketing efforts.

Main Features:

• Find outreach opportunities: Search Respona’s live engine to locate the ideal matches for your outreach efforts, or import them from your preferred apps.
• Simple email automation: Easily create and customize email drip sequences and automate any follow-ups.
• Contact discovery: If you are uncertain who to reach out to, Respona will use job title and seniority to determine the most appropriate contact for each opportunity.
• Personalized outreach: Make your emails stand out from the crowd by incorporating a personalized touch with the help of AI.
• Team inbox: Keep track of your campaigns in one universal inbox for a collaborative effort.

Price: Respona offers a 7-day free trial to play around with all its features. You can upgrade to a Starter plan at $79/month if you love it.

Who should use it: Do you participate in link building, content promotion, blogger outreach, or digital PR? Well, Respona is for you to simplify your outreach effort. And the case studies prove it. In 2 years, ClicData landed 1,500 new referring domains using Respona. 

6. Mailshake

Mailshake is an email outreach and automation platform that helps you streamline and optimize your outreach and follow-up processes.

People often know Mailshake for its features for automating and managing email campaigns. But have you heard of The Prospect Finder?

As the name implies, The Prospect Finder tool identifies potential prospects for your outreach campaigns. You can search for prospects based on various criteria, such as industry, location, company size, and job title.

Thanks to Prospect Finder, you can quickly and easily fill up your pipeline with qualified leads by locating the business contact information of key decision-makers.

Main Features:

• Filter your prospects: Quickly and easily narrow down your prospects by role, location, company, or any combination thereof.
• Universal platform: Say goodbye to using multiple tools – Mailshake allows you to find prospects, automate your cold outreach, and save time and money in one go.
• No added fees: Customers of Mailshake already have access to Prospect Finder as part of their subscription.

Price: Are you looking for a free tool? Well, you’re in luck. You can get 50 free leads with Mailshake’s Prospect Finder. For paid plans, prices start at $58/month.

Who should use it: If you already use Mailshake for your email campaigns, using the Prospect Finder tool is a no-brainer. Saving time and money is the key to any business endeavor.

7. BuzzSumo

BuzzSumo is a content discovery and analysis platform that helps you identify popular and trending content. It does this by focusing on metrics that provide meaningful insights to find respected influential leaders, authors, and creators with active followers and real digital credibility.

Main Features:

• Content discovery: This tool can find popular and trending content. You can search by using keywords, domains, authors, or social networks.
• Content analysis: This tool gives information and explanations about how well certain content is doing. It measures things such as the number of shares on social media, links, and website traffic from other sites.
• Content alerts: You can create alerts for keywords or topics and get notifications when new content includes those words or topics.
• Influencer identification: Find and connect with popular people in your field or specific area of interest. You can search for these influencers based on their topic, location, or social media platform.

Price: BuzzSumo offers a variety of pricing plans, starting with a free 30-day free trial and working its way up through the tiers: Content Creation $199/month, PR & Comms $299/month, Suite $499/month, Enterprise $999/month.

Who should use it: BuzzSumo helps you find popular and effective content. It also gives you information and analysis to improve your content marketing. You can use it to find bloggers who are relevant to your content.

8. Ninja Outreach

Ninja Outreach is an influencer and blogger marketing outreach software that helps you find the right influencer (by filtering through millions of insights) to capture your target audience’s attention.

But it doesn’t stop there. Ninja Outreach also has various features to help you streamline your link building campaigns. Say goodbye to guest posting as your only link building strategy.

Main Features:

• Lead generation at scale: Generating leads won’t be an issue when you can access the millions of profiles in the NinjaOutreach database. Just type in relevant keywords related to your target niche and location to quickly and easily find business leads.
• Find Instagram and Twitter Influencers: Don’t let your social media influencer leads run dry by immediately emailing your Instagram influencer leads or adding them to a planned email campaign.
• Automate link building: Focus on the link building opportunities that are most important. Forget manual filtering — you can now use built-in, one-click filters to easily identify sponsored posts, interviews, podcasts, guest posts, giveaways, infographics, and resource pages.

Price: Are you ready to try Ninja Outreach risk-free? You can do so with a 7-day free trial. After the trial period ends, you can upgrade to a paid plan starting at $99/month.

Who should use it: Ninja Outreach has many features and caters to all needs. From link building to influencer campaigns, Ninja Outreach has you covered for your next blogger outreach campaign.

9. Crunchbase

Crunchbase is an online platform that provides information on startup companies, investments, and people in the business world.

This website has information on over 150 million companies, people, investors, and funds. Entrepreneurs, business owners, and investors use it to learn about companies, discover new opportunities, and make informed decisions.

Main Features: 

Crunchbase is one of my go-to tools for cold outreach email campaigns. 

Why? With Crunchbase, I can:

• Search for businesses that align with my desired target audience
• Find people to contact with accurate contact information
• Email the decision-makers within Crunchbase

Price: Contact data is only available in the Crunchbase Pro plan, starting at $49/month.

Who should use it: If you are a business owner or marketing manager, Crunchbase should 100% hold a spot in your tech stack. Don’t sleep on the power of Crunchbase to qualify potential targets and get instant access to verified contact information.

Bonus: Blogger outreach tools to avoid

Now that we have covered some of my favorite blogger outreach tools that actually work, let’s take a look at some of the tools that you should avoid (and that other top-ranking blog posts recommend):

Inkybee

Neil Patel ranks Inkybee as the seventh-best blogger outreach tool due to its “Ongoing Blog Discovery” feature. This software can scour the internet to consistently find blogs in your niche and serve you the best opportunities on a silver platter.

This service sounds wonderful. However, based on my research, this tool is “taking a break,”…which is odd.

Maybe they are getting ready to release an updated version with better features. If so, great! I look forward to putting it to the test.

I’ve been keeping an eye on this one for a while – a year, in fact, so I’ll take it with a grain of salt. There are many other blogger outreach tools available. Don’t waste your time with this one.

BlogDash

BlogDash makes its way onto G2’s “Best Blogger Outreach Software” list, but I’m not convinced it should’ve made the cut. It has a 3.7 out of 5-star rating with 28 reviews.

Like Inkybee, the website isn’t responsive when I try to take this blogger outreach tool for a spin (showing a blank webpage and a “not secure” message).

I wouldn’t touch BlogDash with a ten-foot pole. But hopefully, it’s just under construction, and I’ll get to try it down the road. Fingers crossed.

Wrapping up

Outreach for link building and scoring coveted guest posts can be tedious, even for experienced SEO professionals. That’s why many people turn to a link building service to help them.

The process involves:

• Sending personalized blog outreach, which causes a significant drain on your resources.
• Scouring the internet for contact information.
• Building relationships.

You could waste weeks searching for the right blogger who never responds, or worse, the email bounces, forcing you to start the process from scratch.

In order to make the most of your outreach campaign, it’s important to have the right marketing tools. These tools will help you streamline the process and achieve meaningful results.

As for what I used to scale my SEO agency over the last three years: BuzzStream and Hunter. These tools are a match made in heaven. You really can’t go wrong. Say goodbye to manual outreach for good.