05 Sep Five tips for working with bloggers and influencers

We all know the power that real-life bloggers, vloggers, and other internet influencers have on brands. These internet superstars have a niche topic that they know a ton about and enjoy writing, talking, filming or streaming to get more information out to the public.

We all know they exist, but still, accessing them and working with remains a mystery for some businesses today. Many of the questions we get are ‘how can we get in touch with these bloggers and influencers and how can we use this strategy to make an impact?’ The good news is, this strategy is advantageous, genuine, and fun at the same time.

Bloggers and internet influencers have a relationship with their followers and fan base. What they say has an impact on their audience’s minds, preferences, and behaviors and can even make an impact on some brands bottom line.

Knowing this, we’ve come up with six ways to work with this niche group to help your business get bloggy.

1. Know your bloggers. If you want to gain traction in this area, you must get to know the appropriate bloggers for your niche. Researching social media, YouTube, and Instagram, for example, is one effective way to do this. You can do a general search online and get a vastly good result. But it can’t stop there. Read or listen to their work and ensure their blog is the right fit for you. Pitching your business to the wrong blog or niche news outlet can easily have an adverse effect.

2. Understand the metrics. Most people have a favorite podcast, blog or influencer they follow, but pitching them on your business just because they’re your favorite is probably not the best approach. Make sure that your top influencer list includes the audience or fan base that you’re ultimately trying to achieve as your customer, has a decent domain authority score, and that you can understand their metrics such as estimated monthly views of their blogs. Having the power of numbers will help you in pitching to the right influencers for the most impact.

3. Make your message relevant. We have a few models of approaching the blogosphere strategy. One is coming up with articles so they can include our content either in part or whole on their website as contributed copy. The articles must be relevant, interesting and most of all, non-salesy. You heard it right. Make sure the sales guy doesn’t read the copy before sending it because sales as the end-point isn’t the most effective strategy here. Making your message relevant will be sufficient enough to have the sales piece work organically.

4. Sampling. Another approach we utilize is the ‘try it’ approach where we develop a top tier list of blog influencers and have a way for them to try our client’s product or service. This elicits a true, honest evaluation of your brand, which should be what you are trying to achieve with this approach. A fair warning here is if you have any ‘bugs’ to work out with your product or service, this might not be the best strategy unless you don’t mind your top influencers talking about the bugs too.

5. Stay engaged. A one-time approach or even a sporadic effort in engaging with internet influencers will not get the results you’re looking for. Stay engaged with their content, when they write, talk, or stream, what they’re doing on social media and more. This will give you excellent insight as to what they’re trying also achieve. It will also help you cultivate a relationship with them where your expertise may be of ongoing assistance!

Our proprietary influencer approach includes a combination of original content creation, relationship engagement, sampling and more.

If your business can benefit by being on the forefront of bloggers, internet influencers, niche websites and news outlets, but you don’t know where to start, then give us a call. We have proven models of strategy for reaching the right influencers for you. (813) 865-3093.