Influencer Marketing For Bloggers: A Beginner’s Guide

Growing a blog involves a lot of hard work and patience. Influencer marketing is a ninja method to grow the readership and reach of your blog. Do you blog to sell your products and services? Or perhaps you are a corporate blogger aiming to build exposure for the company through blogging. Whatever be your blogging goal, boosting your readership would be one of your prime objectives. The rewards of a blog with high, targeted traffic are tremendous – especially if you are looking to make money out of it. Influencer marketing helps to achieve results quickly and efficiently.

What is Influencer Marketing?

Influencer marketing has been around for a long time. Look around, you will find a number of brands that are endorsed by successful sports persons and celebrities. The positive image of the endorser, that is, the influencer, rubs off on the product, making their followers notice it closely.

It is possible to replicate this in the field of blogging as well.

Benefits of Getting Noticed By Influential Bloggers

Targeted endorsement by an influential blogger can put your blog in front of fresh and engaged audience quickly. But there are still more benefits of engaging with influencers:

• Expand your audience to new target group
• Gain trust and credibility of new readers
• Gain higher returns with the same investment of efforts and money.

Most importantly, successful interaction with influencers can boost your inbound blog traffic in the long run. Google considers social sharing as an important signal in ranking content – so there are obvious SEO benefits as well.

How to Get Noticed By Influential Bloggers: 7 Pro Tips to Consider

There are probably millions of blogs out there on every conceivable topic. The biggest challenge is in getting to an influencer to get notice of YOUR blog in particular. How do you achieve this? The following 7 steps will help you get there:

1. Research

First of all, get a top level understanding of the blogging scene in your chosen category or topic. Find out the leading blogs and bloggers in your industry. Understand their journey, what contributed to their success, the type of content that they favor and use, posting frequency, and how they promote their blogs.

Make a list of 20-25  leading bloggers in a spreadsheet. Look at their most successful posts (some bloggers display their most commented and popular posts in the sidebar) – the number of comments and social shares it got, and how the blogger responded to them. Also add their social media profiles – on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.

2. Act on The Blogger List

The next step would be to act on the list that you just prepared.

• Read their blog posts, start writing insightful comments on their blogs.
• Share their posts on your social media profile – always tagging them in your posts.
• If they have a newsletter, sign up for it – it will also help you stay updated with new posts.
• Post your own independent observations on your social media profile on a topic that the influencer has written on. Tag them and acknowledge your update is inspired by their blog. This will help to engage them in the conversation.
• Write posts on your blog on a related topic, and link to their blog by elaborating on some important points discussed in their posts.

3. Prep Up Your Own Website

First impressions matter – so make it count. If your efforts work, and any influencer visits your website, they should find something that they would like to associate with.

“Organize your blog with consistent posting – at least two to three times every week. Consistency is the key here,” says Rob Martin, content strategist at Essaysontime. “It goes without saying that the content should be practical and useful. It should establish your knowledge and experience in your topic, and the fact that you have something useful to share with your readers – in a unique voice.”

4. Plan Your Outreach to The Finest Details

Before you reach out, prepare a game plan to approach the influencers in the right way, and with full preparation. Influencers are the cream of your niche, and likely busy people. Just like you, there would be another 100 bloggers that would send them emails with requests to connect. How will you cut through the clutter and noise?

The best way would look closely at their blogs and look for uncovered topics or a fresh twist on what they have already covered. Most importantly, find the correct email address so that your message lands in the right inbox.

Here is a list of blogger outreach tools to assist your outreach campaign.

5. Make your Pitch

This is the real deal – making a perfect pitch to influencers that gets noticed, and then encourages them to click the reply button. To perfect your pitch, focus on the benefits an influencer will get from associating with you, and design your message around that. Like every other normal human being, they are also focused on what is ‘in it for them’ – show them a value proposition they cannot refuse. Clearly point the content that you plan to share, and how it will appeal to their readers. Here is an excellent resource on crafting the perfect outreach email message. Also decide on a follow-up schedule in case you don’t get an immediate response – following up once or twice is enough.

6. Craft Your Content

Now that you have shortlisted the likely topics that will interest your influencers, it is time to get down to craft that content. Here, you can take several approaches:

• Write a guest post for their blog, based on the guidelines shared on their websites. This is a popular way to put your content quickly before a ready audience.
• Write a roundup post that covers a number of industry experts in your topic, and include your target influencers as well. This approach will help cover multiple influencers in a single piece of content.
• Interviews help to get more personal, but face-to-face may be a bit difficult to score. The easiest method is to use an email questionnaire. You may also record Hangouts or Skype interviews.

7. Internalize the Right Mindset

It is easy to fall into a trap of considering influencer marketing as just another tactic to market your blog. This would be a wrong approach. The best mindset would be to consider all this effort as an opportunity to forge long-term, mutually beneficial partnership with the influencers. Just focus on building a relationship, and everything else will fall into its right place.

Summing Up:

Influencer marketing is a proven way to reach new target audience and grow readership quickly. Done right, it can lead to long-term success of your blog, and improve your search rankings as a bonus. Reaching out to influencers is best done as would approach any other relationship – put in a sincere effort and deal with full honesty. The above seven-step process will help you grow your blog and find new readers through a network of influencers.

What do you think? What has been your experience in connecting with influencers in your industry? What are your biggest challenges in reaching out to influencers? Share your thoughts in comments below.

This was a guest post by Rachel Bartee. She is is a content writer and a marketing consultant at Essayontime. She is content-oriented and knows how to put words into action. She feels passionate about travelling and inspired by her morning yoga. Reach her on Twitter.