If I asked you to go out and do influencer marketing, your natural instinct would be to go out and find the most influential bloggers in your niche, and see if they were open to partnering up.
In fact, this is most peoples’ natural instinct, and as a result it creates a huge skew.
You have the top 1% of bloggers who are receiving 90% of the offers.
And everybody else, is barely getting noticed.
It sort of reminds me of the American economy.
The problem with this is obvious – the top bloggers don’t have the time to deal with all these offers.
Nor are they interested in them – because realistically, a blogger is only looking to sell to their audience at most a few times a month.
This means unless you have an extremely compelling offer, and/or a great relationship with the influencer, you’re hard pressed to find an influencer willing to work with you.
Take Pat Flynn, for example, who runs an incredibly popular internet marketing blog. He’s essentially one of most influential bloggers in that niche.
Recently, he had to declare email bankruptcy, meaning that he was just so inundated with requests that he couldn’t keep up with his inbox and had to just delete all income messages and start fresh.
It wasn’t too long ago that I saw I had over 9000 unread emails in my inbox.
Yes, nine-thousand.
Each new email that arrived became a constant reminder of just how many people I wasn’t able to answer, and it made me think about who I was letting down. – Pat Flynn
Does this sound like someone who has the time to hear about your product?
Meanwhile, you have guys like myself, who are getting no offers at all.
Of course, I run a considerably smaller internet marketing blog as compared to Pat Flynn, but it certainly doesn’t mean I have no audience at all.
And let’s face it, wouldn’t you rather have 100% of a piece of the pie than 0% of the whole pie?
In short, this is where we have come up with the idea of the Influencer Sweet Spot.
Basically, finding the right level of influence where you can actually get the time of day from the blogger and get the results you need to drive your business home.
While the Influencer Sweet Spot may not be the very largest blogs on the internet, the benefit is that there are substantially more of these kinds of blogs.
All you have to do is find them, which is where we come in.
Each niche is different, and brings varying amounts of traffic, social following, and SEO metrics as indicators of influence within the niche.
At the moment, we can’t tell you where you should be targeting for each individual niche.
But what we can do is provide you all of the data and filtering power to enable you to find the right bloggers.
Here are some of the key metrics we have built in to our software to drive your prospecting.
Location
In today’s content marketing world, location is becoming more and more important.
Dominating on a global scale is just unrealistic for the vast majority of businesses. They’re concerned with local markets because they’re local brands.
This means they want to tap into an audience that is actually in their area, so they can buy their products and services.
We’re currently leveraging online databases like Alexa to get the blogger’s address, as well as the Top Level Domain to see if it is a .com, .au, or another country.
So, if you’re a backpacking store in Atlanta, Georgia, you have better odds at finding a travel blogger near you who specializes in the area.
They may not have quite the audience size as the biggest travel blogs on the internet, but they’re a heck of a lot more targeted.
This is perfect not only for bloggers but for lead generation as well!
Social Following
Social Media is playing a huge role in today’s consumer marketers.
But with so many different accounts, it can be difficult to find the right bloggers who specialize in the areas you care about.
For example, if you sell fashion you might be more prone to a blogger with a larger Pinterest following. Or perhaps you’re more interested in video marketing and therefore want to be sure they have a YouTube channel.
In each case we’ve gone out and found the blogger’s social media profiles including:
- Youtube
- Google+
Additionally we give you the following:
- The number of times the post has been shared across each channel, so you can gauge how engaged their following is at a channel level.
- The average number of social shares their articles get
Traffic And SEO
The biggest blogs on the internet receive millions of page views a month and rank in the top 10k of Alexa.
If we’re trying to step back for a bit, consider targeting blogs who are in the 50k – 250k a month bracket. Of course this is going to depend on the niche, but this is a very healthy amount of exposure, without necessarily being to big for one’s britches (if you know what I mean).
The biggest blogs on the internet have page ranks of 5 and above, and domain authorities in the 60s.
But, to our point, there are considerably more blogs with PRs between 2 and 4, with DAs above 40, who have a lot to offer in terms of SEO authority and audience size.
NinjaOutreach is designed such that you can filter out the bottom AND the top, so set your range and see the results that come back. Expand or contract as you see fit.
Response Rates And Article Types
The goal here is to find the people who are open to partnering with brands.
One of the best indicators is simply a willingness to open and respond to emails, as well as a history of working with brands.
At NinjaOutreach, every time someone is contacted through our system we keep track of their open and click rates. This gives us an idea of what your chances of success are assuming you have a compelling pitch.
Although this information will not be accessible as part of the beta launch, we will be collecting this data and eventually release it to our users.
Additionally, we’ve searched their blogs for keywords related to sponsored posts, product reviews, guest posts, or giveaways, so you have an idea if they do the work you’re looking for.
We hyperlink these results to the articles themselves, so you can check out the quality and confirm our data.
Conclusion
If you’re looking to drive repeatable, scalable, results, it’s about finding the sweet spot between authority and ubiquity.
There may only be one Pat Flynn, but there are thousands of other, quality internet marketers and bloggers who are open to working with the right brands.
Simply work on writing a compelling pitch, and happy prospecting!
