Reaching out to influencers and gaining their attraction is a smart way of marketing.
As a blogger, you cannot do it all alone. You need extra hands.
And influencer marketing is a great way to easily gain traction and skyrocket your growth.
The key is – you just have to make sure that you don’t reach out to influencers, or any other fellow-bloggers with the sole aim of getting benefited.
I personally love to make friends – and it is the only “casual” and “cool” thing that I do in my business that doesn’t sound like “work”.
I love building genuine relationships with fellow bloggers, readers, and influencers.
The benefits just follow – but I don’t reach out to anyone with the aim of getting only the benefits myself. I have this as a strict rule in my outreach campaigns.
Having said that, in this post, I will share 5 smart ways in which you can gain the attention of influencers.
If you have been trying to get in the radar of any of your favorite influencers and have not succeeded yet, I highly recommend you to follow these tips.
#1 Create expert roundup posts
Before you give that “duh” look, let me tell you this – I totally agree that roundup posts are a bit overrated these days.
For one, there’s too much of this kind that’s published every day. And second, the quality of round ups get diminished as the volume increases.
More and more people are embracing this approach in order to get more shares, comments, and traffic.
But the whole purpose of publishing such roundups is often overlooked and under-used.
Of course, there is no right way and wrong way of doing this.
Whom you choose as experts to include in the roundup totally depends on the kind of your business, which influencers you want to attract, and what outcome you expect from the post.
All these differ from business to business – so I cannot give you a one-size-fits-all blueprint.
However, what I can suggest you are a few important tips to keep in mind to make this work.
When you plan to do an expert round up, you have to decide on two major things –
- What do you want the outcome of the post to be?
- Who are the experts you are going to invite?
Number 3 is the question you are going to ask them, but this is of lesser importance than the first two.
For the purpose of this post, I assume that you want to get in the radar of a few influencers and that’s why you want to feature them. If so you need to first take a list of influencers you want to reach out to.
And all of the list members should not be solely the influencers you want to reach out to.
You should also add your fellow bloggers and friends to the mix – ignoring your friends is not a good idea!
And remember you won’t get a 100% response to your expert round up invitations. So you have to prepare a longer list than you expect to feature in your expert round up post.
And, make sure this is not the first time you hit them up all with your cold email.
You have to have established some sort of pre-relationship with them (a reach out, a “hi” in social media, leaving comment, or contributing a guest post on their blog, sharing their stuff and so on) before you reach out to them.
#2 Publish interviews
Publishing interviews of influencers is a great way to get in the radar of the influencer as well as their followers.
However, this is not so easy. Most influencers are certainly busy.
With an expert roundup, their response is going to be very short – and you can probably get their response.
But a dedicated interview means more content and more time spent for the influencer.
Depending upon how well you have established your pre-relationship with the influencer, you might get a yes, or no or a no-response!
So publishing interviews is more challenging than publishing a roundup – but in an interview, you feature just one person.
The whole focus of that interview is one influencer – and he/she might enjoy the full attention a lot more, as opposed to being featured alongside a list of others in a roundup post.
Both expert roundups and interviews have their own pros and cons; which is why I suggest you do a combination of both!
#3 Publish a content roundup
Who doesn’t love links and mentions to their content? Every blogger will certainly appreciate a mention and a link back.
By publishing content roundups you feature a list of excellent blog posts you came across in a week or in a month.
A word of caution here – just be sure that you maintain high standards when selecting content to feature in the roundup.
When you start to publish content roundups in a consistent manner (say every week, or once in a fortnight), you might end up not getting enough posts to feature.
So you might be tempted to settle for mediocre posts to fill up the slot – and this is dangerous.
Over the time, your roundup posts will slowly fail to pick up interest from your readers.
When you keep up the standards and when you do this consistently you increase your chances of getting in the radar of your favorite influencers (by including their content in your roundups).
And, not to mention – publishing such roundups will also help you deliver highly useful content to your readers that you did not necessarily create yourself!
#4 Write a follow-up post
This is more of a personal approach where you publish a follow-up blog post on your own blog based on another blog post written by an influencer.
For such an approach to work perfectly, you have to totally base your blog post on one particular idea or one particular blog post by the influencer.
Freely and openly mention that you have based your blog post on that particular idea and link out to that blog post.
Freely use quotes and ideas from the blog post and give credit.
Once the post goes live, don’t forget to send a personalised email to the influencer telling that you have published a piece of content voicing your opinion on the topic and that piece of content is solely based on/motivated by his/her blog post (mention title and link of blog post in email)!
A word of caution – don’t overdo this. Use sparingly!
Here’s an example post by Henneke – note that at the end of the post, she acknowledges Kathy Keats for inspiring the post!
#5 Publish a case study
A case study? Yep!
This takes a little more work – but this approach puts you directly in the radar of your favorite influencer.
All you have to do is this – pick up a particular piece of advice, a strategy, or a product of the influencer.
Apply whatever strategy/tip he/she teaches in that!
And publish the results as a detailed case study.
Now this is not something you sit down and do in a day or two.
First, you should identify that such a strategy or a tip or a method that is solely taught by that influencer. If it is a product, that’s an added bonus!
Nowadays, lots of “generic” tips are being shared all over the internet.
So you have to make sure you pick that unique thing shared by that influencer alone – something like the Skyscraper technique by Brian Dean or the Drafting technique by Derek Halpern.
Apply it to your business, do a case study, track the results and publish it as a blog post.
Let the influencer know about your case study once it goes live!
This not only puts you in the radar of the influencer; you might even be featured on their website!
Conclusion
Influencer marketing is a big thing these days. Not only it helps you to skyrocket the growth of your business (speed is important, don’t you agree?), but it also helps you to build an empire of great contacts.
You never know which contact can come up with what opportunity for your business.
At the same time, getting the influencers to pay attention to you is not an easy-peasy thing!
Influencers are busy, and they’ve got so much noise around them to notice you!
But that doesn’t mean you should drop the plan!
In this blog post I’ve shared 5 smart ways to use content to gain the attention of your favorite influencers!
Implement these tips and see the results for yourself.
Do share your thoughts in the comments below.
Jane shares brutally honest blogging tips at her blog. She suggests you to pick up her content creation course and create killer content for your business on a regular basis!