Content promotion doesn’t always have to be a catch-22!
Especially when you know how to find influencers and coerce them to do all of the heavy lifting while promoting your content.
It’s an easy task, and if you’ve heard the saying “work smarter, not harder,” this post is for you.
In the blogging industry the old adage of “If you create stellar content they will flock to your site” seems to be obsolete.
The general rule of the thumb is to spend 20%of your time creating your content and the remaining 80% in promoting it. 20% of your effort produces 80% of the results and vice versa.
Easy steps to attract Influencers to link and promote your content in influencer Marketing.
Sometimes you might be wondering how your competitors get a heck lot of engaged visitors to every single post they publish.
Here’s a little secret…
They aren’t driving traffic on their own. In fact, the vast majority of traffic that comes in is from influencers.
These people have massive audiences that can drive hundreds or thousands of visitors to your blog with a single tweet.
Influencer marketing stats
Now before we let the skeletons out of the closet, let’s delve into some recent stats and importance of influencer marketing.
A report by eMarketer in 2017 found that marketers all the over the world shelled out a cool $570 million on influencer marketing. In 2018, $1.6 billion was spent on sponsored posts on Instagram alone.
While perusing the development of the industry and the mind blowing results it has generated, we’re certain that 2019 will be the most exciting year of influencer marketing, with the industry predicted to grow by over 200% compared to the figures in 2017.
Source
When you look at the stats below, it definitely makes sense why influencer marketing is turning out to be a hugely popular technique to drive sales:
- A study by Tomson states that influencer marketing yields a ROI of $6.50 on every dollar spent.
- 71% of influencers are of the notion that it’s an authentic and honest voice that keeps their audience engaged.
- Approximately 40% of people reported to have made an online purchase after seeing it used by an influencer on Twitter, YouTube, or Instagram.
- Coming to millenials, just 1% of them trust advertisements, with 33% trusting blog reviews while purchasing.
The above facts clearly show why influencer marketing is smoking hot at the moment.
But how do you get influencers to not only share your blog post on social channels, but even link to it?
Let’s get started.
#1 – Select Influencers
The best technique to find influencers in your niche is to begin with influencers who are promoting your competitors’ blog posts.
A word of warning here……….
Be careful of social media fake fans since numbers can be easily faked. These days it’s a cakewalk to buy thousands of followers on Twitter but with zero to a handful of engagement. An engaged audience list of 2000 is way better compared to “fake influencers” with 10,000 social media fans who never engage.
So, instead of searching for social media accounts with countless followers, look for people who get greater number of retweets. These accounts belong to authentic influencers.
A top tool that can help you in this quest is Buzzsumo. Just enter your seed keyword, topic or niche. Next view the people who are sharing it on Twitter by clicking on ‘view sharers.’
Once you get the list, filter by average retweets to discover the content amplifiers as shown below:
Next click ‘view links shared’ to find whether the person shares content on a consistent basis around your chosen topic.
Once done, sort your results based on the value of average retweets and the type of content they share. You need to find influencers who are directly related to your niche or have a strong reason for linking or sharing your content.
The other point worth noting is to analyze a few articles by influencrs on your compiled list and see how often they link to other websites. The higher the number the better!
Besides Buzzsom, you can use these 15 free influencer marketing tools that can help you find influencers.
#2 – Create 10x Content and Include an Influencer in it
Creating 10x Content is not so easy. Very often, knowing how and where to start can pose a grave challenge. Because of content saturation and content overload, you need to develop your own 10x content so that you become equally good as the top 10 people in search results for a given keyword, phrase or term.
Here is a list of techniques by which you can create mind blowing content:
1 – Create an Idea
The main ingredient for any content creation strategy is to know what readers in your niche are looking for. Begin with looking at search results and content around your industry and remember the intent or motive for each search.
Next, take your target keywords and use free tools like Ubersuggest and Answer the Public. These tools will help you generate topic ideas by providing data of related searches and other closely related keywords.
2 – Conduct Research
Once you create a list of topics or questions, it’s time to find the search traffic for each keyword and how the competition looks. The more search traffic a topic has, the greater you can benefit from the keyword. But note that more traffic leads to more competition. A great option to see the results would be Ahrefs’ Content Explorer.
Now is the best time to go back to your list of topic ideas from Ubersuggest and Ahrefs.
Enter the topics into Content Explorer and you’ll get a list of the most popular articles based on their “performance metrics,” like social shares, organic search traffic and referring domains. The main objective here is to look for content that is popular, but lacks some key information, which you think when included, would perform even better. Finally, ensure that the content you choose doesn’t refer to sales pages as the user intent here is to make a purchase rather than get information from a blog post.
You can also us Product Hunt to get topic ideas since 90% of people who posted on the platform already Googled their problem. And came up empty.
Or better……
Go back to Buzzsumo and pick those topics shared by influencers
3 – Create the Post
The key here is to make your content 10 times better compared to the one you just chose. Keep in mind that you may already have content on your blog that needs a little bit of updated imagery or re-formatting. Keep an eye on it.
Next ask yourself the question:
“Do I have proprietary data that cannot be found elsewhere on the web?’
Leveraging on this data is a fantastic way to create 10x content easily since no one else has the information.
Here are some more ways to create viral content:
- Use odd numbers in the heading
- Use very short URLs
- Use short sentences at least in the beginning to hook your readers fast as it boosts readability by 58%.
- Add facts and figures whenever possible
- Align your featured image left or right (if any)
- Add images, infographics, video content etc if relevant
- Write powerful and catchy headlines
- Use the Skycraper technique
What type of content can you promote to influencers?
Given below are some easy suggestions:
- Listicles
- Interviews
- Expert Roundups
- Create a SlideShare from a quote given by an influencer
- Give expert tips and compile them in a single blog posts
- How-to articles
Next thing………
While creating the content, involve influencers by getting a quote from them or link to some of their most relevant snippets. You can also partner with an influencer and write data-backed research that hasn’t been published elsewhere.
#3 – Contact Influencers
Alright……….
You got a massive list of influencers and created 10 times better content. It’s now time to cast your net as wide and far as possible.
Get out of your comfort zone and start asking people to link or share your content. Begin with those influencers with lesser but more engaged followers since their email open rates are high.
There are three methods involved in this:
1 – Email
Email them and say something like:
Hey (Name),
You recently shared a post titled “Title” on Twitter.
I’ve written a similar comprehensive post from a new perspective.
Here’s the link to the post (Link). I’m sure it’ll be helpful to you and your followers and would appreciate if you could give me your feedback.
Happy Reading!
(Your Name)
2 – Tweet
If you don’t have their email, you can leave a small tweet, which goes something like:
@(Infuencer name) saw you shared (link to the article) and I really loved it. It inspired me to write a similar in-depth post (insert your link). Hope you enjoy the read!
3 – Paid Marketing
This is something Larry Kim does….
He creates a list of influencers on Twitter and performs paid marketing to them. This way, his posts get in front of the right people at the right time.
This technique has also garnered his attention from press and television.
You’ll certainly not have a 100% success rate, but if you average anywhere between 30% to 40%, it can be considered a huge success.
#4 – Network with influencers
An important element while asking people to share or link your content is to network with them as it results in a higher response rate. Leave engaging comments on their blog posts, share their content and strike up a conversation on Twitter or via email.
Devote some time every day to network with these big guns. And you’ll get on their radar soon.
As a result, you won’t even have to persuade them to share your content. They will do it themselves.
Final Thoughts
Influencer marketing is BIG!
If you diligently follow the above steps, you can easily get backlinks from world class websites and get unprecedented exposure to your blog.
Have you ever tried getting links from influencers? What was your go-to method while scoring links from them and getting your content viral?
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