We all want to know how to get our content upvoted. Whether it’s on Inbound, Hacker News, Product Hunt, Reddit, or some other platform – we want to know what motivates someone to share our content.
So we went to the people who know better than anyone – Inbound Influencers.
We interviewed 37 of them and have collected their influencer marketing examples.
Many of these experts have had their content go viral or have incredibly authority on the platforms they engage on.
In short – they know how to get influencers to share their content.
Table of Content
- Krystian Szastok – Digital Marketing Manager at RocketMill
- Adam Connell – Marketing Director at UK Linkology
- Nick Loper – Author, Online Entrepreneur
- Ann Smarty – Brand and Community Manager at InternetMarketingNinjas
- Yaro Park – Entrepreneur and Blogger at Residual Incomer
- Warren Whitlock – Digital Business Development Strategist
- Codrut Turcanu – Marketing Online Since 1999
- Brian Lang – Founder of Small Business Ideas Blog
- Sue Anne Dunlevie – Helps Bloggers Make Money
- Stoney deGeyter – Author of The Best Damn Web Marketing Checklist
- Jason James Delodovici – Serial Entrepreneur
- Minuca Elena – Freelance Writer Specialized in Creating Expert Roundups
- Mike Ramsey – President of Nifty Marketing
- Chris Makara – Digital Strategist and Founder of Ciked
- Gabriella Sannino – Owner of Level 343
- James Blews – Online Presence Consultant
- Nathan Pierce – Editor of MicroBrewr
- Jacob Cass – Founder of JUST™ Creative
- Robbie Richards – Author of Robbierichards.com
- Joseph Ho – Owner and Creator of E-Alchemists.com
- Chris Lee – SEO and Niche Site Strategist
- Sean Si – CEO and Founder of SEO Hacker and Qeryz
- Swadhin Agrawal – Professional Freelance Writer
- isra-tv – Founder of HumanProofDesigns.com
- Tim Soulo – Marketing guy at Ahrefs
- Ross Marchant – Marketing Manager for BrightLocal
- Thomas Smale – Co-founder at FE International
- Jock Purtle – Owner of Digitalexits
- Jon Dykstra – Fat Stacks Entrepreneur
- Mi Muba – Veteran Media Professional
- Gael Breton – Gael is the founder of Authority Hacker
- Dennis Seymour – Digital Marketer
- Joel Runyon – Founder of Impossible Ventures
Krystian Szastok
Digital Marketing Manager at RocketMill
One of the most successful blog posts on my own blog was a round up about how to start an SEO company…
This post has served me as a go-to resource, elevated me in my local SEO circles and provided continuous relevant traffic to my blog.
I used my online contacts and build new relationships because of that early write up.
In terms of selling products for clients I have recently worked on a project where we asked fans of a tv show to provide quotes…
We then build an interactive infographic which contained these quotes and items based on them.
It was a success I believe mostly because it was fan based.
Adam Connell
Marketing Director at UK Linkology
We’ve been using influencer marketing in a fairly low key way, but despite this we’ve had a lot of success.
At the most basic level, we’ve mentioned influencers in our content and let them know that we’ve mentioned them.
We don’t push influencers to share our content and we ensure that they’re only mentioned when relevant but the impact has been incredible.
The most success has come from crowd sourced content such as group interviews.
A good example is from my personal blog, Blogging Wizard where I reached out to a number of industry influencers, asking for their best tip on standing out online (you can find the post here).
We hit over 2,000 social shares which was impressive, but what made this even better was that I teamed up with Niall from TweakYourBiz.com and republished the post as an infographic.
This got a further 2,000+ social shares and the infographic alone has been seen by over 30,000 people.
All of this was possible because influencers were directly involved in the content creation process, then we let them know about it via email and social networks.
The repurposing of the post added another dimension to the success of this piece of content.
Nick Loper
An author, online entrepreneur
My most effective attempt at “influencer marketing” was with my Work Smarter book launch.
The book was a collection of online resources recommended by other entrepreneurs and people in my network, but many of the contributors I didn’t know personally prior to launch.
What I did was send each one a personal note explaining I’d cited them as a contributor in my latest book project, that it was free today on Amazon, and included a click-to-tweet link to share if they thought it was a cool project.
I sent around 400 emails, which took a ton of time to write and personalize, but the end result was a social media carpet bombing like I’d never pulled off before.
The book was shared around 200 times on Twitter within the first couple days of the launch, generating more than 5000 clicks from that channel alone.
In total, the launch generated over 20,000 free downloads and has gone on to be a pretty successful passive income asset in the 13 months since.
Ann Smarty
Brand and Community manager at InternetMarketingNinjas.com
I am actively using content marketing to engage the influencers. Here’s my article that talks more about various strategies I’ve been experimenting with.
One of the best examples of how we bring influencers to our site is our #VCBuzz Twitter chat where we bring a new social media influencer every week.
It has been the only way we’ve marketed the platform.
By participating in our Twitter chats, influencers bring their audience to our platform and also educate our community on various social media marketing tactics. It’s a double win!
It’s also easy to scale: I schedule all the guests one month ahead which means we have fresh content weekly on our blog no matter what!
Yaro Park
Entrepreneur and blogger at Residual Incomer
I didn’t leverage influencer marketing yet. But I will definitely do it for my Amazon FBA business.
Give free items for people for reviews. And then they will promote on their blog, instagram, twitter, facebook, pinterest and youtube channel.
Then I will get great traffic, brand exposure and promotion. And of course bigger sells.
Warren Whitlock
Digital business development strategist
I view every relationship as a personal connection. When I meet anyone, I research their social media information to make sure I connect where they are most active.
Once connected, I look for opportunities to help them promote and discuss issues they find important.
Focusing on them makes sure that I only need select from those referred and asking for help.
Codrut Turcanu
Marketing Online Since 1999
I sell my brand, skills, products and services through content marketing and blogging.
I use a specific strategy where I interview prominent bloggers and experienced marketers in my industry.
They all have to answer a key question. This type of article is called an expert roundup blog post.
How does it work? Simple. I collect their insights in a single word document and then add an intro and a call 2 action at the end of the post.
This takes me about 3 weeks from start to finish. Here’s an example:White hat link Building roundup This took some web customization to put it together and look the way it is now.
You don’t have to customize it like that though.
How did it get more than 2k shares (and back-links)? Active promotion.
Once post goes live I spend the next 30 days promoting the blog post like nobody else.
I just started to get the word out about AHREFS post above, so while I’m writing this the post is just started to gain traction.
Expert roundups are like seminars. They provide expert advice and networking opportunities, without the extra costs.
You can use them in any niche for as long as there are enough pro bloggers and passionate writers to answer your KEY question.
Once people know you and your brand, selling your service or product becomes a breeze.
This way you can skip the intro and forget about cold calling all together.
Brian Lang
Marketing consultant
The key to successful influencer marketing is to think about what the influencer wants first and cater to that need.
Most people who fail with influencer marketing think about themselves or selling their product without taking the influencer’s needs into consideration.
For products, a classic strategy is to give away your product for free to bloggers that have reviewed similar products.
Review bloggers like getting free stuff and many of those bloggers will consequently try out and review the product.
Influencers can also be helpful with promoting your blog, content or brand.
A couple of popular ways to do this is by mentioning them in a blog post and letting them know about it or doing an expert roundup like this one.
Although I’ve had other posts that broke 1,000 social shares since then, but that post was a big deal at the time, because my blog was fairly new and unknown at the time.
In both cases, I’m giving the influencer something of value.
Free products targeted towards their interest or free exposure on my blog.
Sue Anne Dunlevie
Sue Anne help bloggers make money with their blogs
I make friends with other influencers by commenting on their blogs and sharing their posts on social media before I ever connect with them by email.
Once I have made a connection and get to know them, then I occasionally ask them to share a particular blog post.
I did that for my “How to Start A Blog And Make Money” post and it received 1.1K social shares.
Stoney deGeyter
Author of The Best Damn Web Marketing Checklist
Working with influencers provides a plethora of benefits, from links to increased website traffic to expanding your social media presence.
We experienced this firsthand when we released the updated version of our ever-popular Link Building Secrets Revealed.
This eBook includes top strategies from 20 leading influencers in the link building industry.
In addition to including strategies in the eBook, each influencer also contributed to the #LinkSecrets series on our blog that in turn promoted the eBook.
The results? Fantastic. The influencers included in the project not only linked to and shared the eBook, but also their individual blog posts.
They also shared some of our social media posts with their followers.
We saw an increase in links to our website, a spike in web traffic, a boost in followers of our blog and an expansion of our community on social media.
What about the influencers?
They also received links to their websites or blogs, social media mentions and increased exposure with their target audiences.
It was a win-win situation for all involved. And that’s the most important thing to remember when working with influencers.
It’s not all about me or what your company can gain. You have to make sure the relationship is equitable and that the influencer is also gaining something from the experience.
Jason James Delodovici
Serial entrepreneur and digital marketer
One way I leverage industry influencers to brand myself is by referencing them and including them in my blog posts – either on my own blog or on other blogs.
Sadly, there are more popular blogs and websites then mine so if I really want to impress the influencer I reference them on guest posts.
Once I link out to them I email them and thank them for their content and let them know that I referenced them in my latest post.
I’ll ask them to share my content with their audience.
Sometimes if I want more, I tell them that I’ve been working on an AMAZING blog post that I think would fit in PERFECTLY with their blog audience – then I ask them to guest blog on their site.
It works pretty well.
After I built relationships with key industry influencers I either email them or ask them in numerous Slack groups I’m in to share my content.
This worked extremely well for my piece on customer acquisition.
Minuca Elena
Freelance Writer, Specialized in Creating Expert Roundups
To grow your brand you need to focus on three things:
- Publishing high-quality content on your site
- Being featured on other blogs on expert roundups, interviews, podcasts and guest posts.
- Getting more followers and engagement on social media.
When you create a blog post, no matter how good it would be, or how much you will share it, or how many followers you have, the reality is that only you are actively promoting it.
But when you publish an expert roundup, you get other influencers to share your post.
They write good quality content for your site, they share it and some of them even link to it. It’s a win-win situation.
Roundups also have other long-term benefits too, because through roundups you can build relationships with influencers with whom it would be difficult to connect without this content strategy.
I suggest you follow up with the experts and pitch them for a guest post.
You will have many more chances of getting accepted than if you would cold email them.
Also, having an expert roundup on your site will increase your authority because your readers will see how well-connected and respected you are in your niche.
There are many other benefits of expert roundups that will help you boost your SEO and revenue.
Mike Ramsey
President of Nifty Marketing
I have found that guest blogging on sites with a much bigger audience than mine has been the fastest way to achieve success.
The best example of this in the posts I have done on Moz.com which has on the the largest followings on the web in the internet marketing space.
You can see the posts at moz have done way better than they could of if I would have published them elsewhere.
Chris Makara
Interactive marketing and founder of Ciked
I recently created an expert roundup post on a brand new domain/site. Aside from the homepage it was the only piece of content on the site.
While most expert roundups are only 20 people or sometimes 50, I wanted to blow the standard roundup posts out of the water.
I set a goal of getting at least 100 participants, which I did.
So I ended up asking over 100 experts what their 3 favorite social media management tools were.
I knew that by asking what 3 tools they liked, it would provide a wide range of responses.
In the end, over 80 different tools were mentioned.
The key for me was not just gathering up these experts for their opinion, but also emailing them once the post was live.
I created a unique “tweet ready” link specifically for them that listed their 3 favorite tools and a link to the blog post.
Not only that, but I have queued up a nice variety of tweets where these experts are mentioned and link to the blog post.
Due to the nature of the blog post and the audience it has, almost all of them continuously retweet the tweet when they are mentioned introducing it to their social audience.
Within a month of the post going live, it had over 3,000 social shares.
By leveraging influencers with an audience, I was able to make this post a successful social piece which results in getting the name of a new site/product out there that not only drove traffic, but generated email subscribers for a brand new site
Gabriella Sannino
Owner of Level 343
We use influencer marketing on a regular basis, whether it’s pinging someone on Twitter and saying, “Hey, quoted you in this article,” interviewing one of our peers in the business or just sharing to our wide social network (which includes numerous influencers).
A great example is our Top SEO Women series, which ran for four years.
Not only did the women we wrote about get more (and free) exposure, but the four-part series is still one of our top traffic hits.
It just goes to show that you can do for others while doing for yourself – and they were more than happy to share us around while they were at it.
James Blews
Online presence consultant, owner of James Blews Consulting LLC
Influencer marketing for me occurs in three stages, and it greatly depends on the content and the industry that the brand is in.
The first is to simply reach out to influencers for their suggestions, concerns and answers to questions.
By saving the helpful people, you usually have a wealth of knowledge, as well as social media promotion to go back to in the future for content.
The second occurs after a piece of content is created.
I will use the influencer’s work, articles or other content as a citation, adn then contact them after the article.
In most cases, the article is shared by them on social media and even in their own websites.
The final stage would be to add to their own citable content and articles.
By growing a piece of content that they are linking to, or by becoming an authority of the type of content, you become their source.
I will then contact them, and usually get an updated link from their work.
The glue that holds this all together is to network.
Whether it is over social media, at a convention, requesting interviews/article help, or even just saying ‘I think your content is terrific at XYZ’, if it is starting a sincere relationship based on respect, it works.
This is also why I responded here…I don’t usually turn requests, whether they come from a unique email or a templated one.
Nathan Pierce
Planning to start a brewery and learning how to do that at MicroBrewr.com
MicroBrewr is all about how to start a brewery.
I had a dream to start a brewery, then I realized that I’m not experienced or qualified to do that.
So MicroBrewr is one of the ways that I’m learning how to start a brewery.
Each week on MicroBrewr Podcast I talk with a brewer, a brewery owner, or another expert in the craft beer industry.
These experts graciously share their years of experience, lessons learned, and other helpful insight.
And I share it with other people who are trying to start a brewery. Of course I am trying to grow the audience.
I want to help as many people as possible. And I want to make MicroBrewr financially sustainable.
For that I need a large audience. The obvious point is that influencers have knowledge that is valuable to me and my audience.
Influencers additionally have a large existing audience of their own to draw from.
Anybody who has been in the craft beer industry for some time has valuable insight from which I can learn.
The stars of the industry are the ones whose stories we most want to hear.
But the stars don’t always have to come from your immediate sector.
Who knew that I would ever have John Lee Dumas on a podcast about starting a brewery.
It turns out that several breweries already use podcasting as a marketing tool and to build relationships with their customers.
So I found a way to fit onto MicroBrewr Podcast the person at the top of the podcasting game, and asked him how to use podcasting for a brewery.
The day after that episode went live, the show had record downloads—double the number of downloads of any other day—and it hasn’t been replicated since.
So don’t limit yourself to the stars of your niche.
Sometimes stars outside of your niche also have insight that is helpful to your audience.
Jacob Cass
Founder of JUST™ Creative
Interviewing influencers is a great way to get new eyes on your own brand.
One such example I did recently was a notable designer, Bill Gardner, on logo trends and how he conducts his logo trend reports.
Robbie Richards
Author of robbierichards.com
You can use influencers to help validate (and sell) affiliate products.
One of the best mediums to do this is expert roundups. Example: Two months ago I published this expert roundup where I reached out to 58 online marketing experts and asked them the following queestion: If you could only use 3 tools for keyword research, which 3 would you choose?
This particular expert roundup has generated close to $1,000 in affiliate sales in the last 60 days.
How? I’m an affiliate for SEMrush (Note: I’m only an affiliate for products I actually use).
I knew that some of the experts in the roundup would choose SEMrush as their top tool for keyword research.
As a matter, SEMrush received 34 votes and ranked #1 ahead of Google Keyword Planner!
Since the expert roundup is targeting the mid-funnel search term “best keyword research tool”, I used influencer opinion to create social proof for my affiliate product.
Now, when someone is actively searching for a keyword research tool they land on my post (currently ranking #2 in Google) and see that 34 experts voted for SEMrush, validating it as a top potential solution.
This social proof has closed the sale…in a non-salesy way.
Joseph Ho
Owner and creator of E-Alchemists.com
During the valentine day this year, i did a blogger outreach for one of my local client.
My client was selling flower through their ecommerce site.
We used ninjaoutreach tool to search for the top 10 female bloggers in our country.
We then contact each blogger and send them our latest series of flower bouquet.
The only thing we ask for return is a facebook or instagram post on their profile.
We then issue each blogger with a unique coupon code to track the campaign.
The outreach campaign reached a total of about 20k people on facebook and instagram, and there was a lot of likes and share.
We track based on the data given by each blogger.
We had a few sales generated based on the different coupon code and i can say is quite an effective campaign to reach 20k people exposure within the short amount of time.
Chris Lee
Chris blogs over at RankXL.com
Since the day I started my blog, RankXL 6 months ago, everything has been about influencer marketing.
It’s the primary reason the blog has grown to where it is today in a fairly short period of time.
When you first start a blog, product, or any kind of website nobody knows who you are.
They don’t know you exist. Even if they somehow stumble upon your site, they don’t know if you’re credible.
One of the best ways to create an audience is to expose yourself to the audiences of other influencers.
They already have the audience you’re looking for, and in turn, their audience is looking for the type of content that you’re providing.
One of the best ways to do that is to guest post Why?
Because it’s the easiest way to get an influencer to feature you on their site.
They don’t need to go publish an entire article about you themselves.
You’re doing all the work for them. I was able to guest post on the blogs of some really big influencers when I first started out.
They were people I’ve been following since I ever started a blog so it was a really cool feeling to be able to write on their site.
How did I do it? I wrote out the post first. In the beginning, my best ideas for blog posts were saves for guest posts.
Most big influencers get dozens, if not hundreds, of guest post requests everyday.
Because I didn’t have much of a reputation at the time, I wrote out the entire post first.
I just emailed them and said, “I just wrote this awesome article about X.
Would you take a look and consider using it for a guest post?”
They didn’t base their answer on my reputation (since I didn’t have any). They based it on the quality of my article (which was top notch).
I emailed 5 influencers with my first guest post, and one responded.
They said yes, and I was featured the next week.
From that point on, I could use my previous guest post as part of my pitch.
It was really high quality stuff, and shows other people I reach out to that the post I submit would be valuable material.
It’s like a snowball effect. If you can get your guest post on some big blogs, you can leverage that into more opportunities in the future.
When you’re new to an industry, people can see your past guest posts and think, “If he was featured on big blogs like X, Y, and Z, then I wouldn’t mind having him write on my site as well.” Just focus on landing your first big guest post.
From there, it becomes much easier.
Sean Si
Sean Si is the CEO and Founder of SEO Hacker
I’ve always been big on creating evergreen content that will bring 10x value to my readers.
It’s simply one of, if not the most, awesome strategy available to an SEO specialist like me.
Create 10x content – whether Skyscraped or not, optimize it like hell for my target keywords, publish it, then promote it on my social channels and network of influence.
A little linkbuilding is involved too if the keyword/s I’m targeting is tough.
It’s actually from there that I’ve been able to build SEO Hacker.
And from my SEO Hacker branding, I’m able to leverage that authority and pass some of it on to my next startup, Qeryz.
Swadhin Agrawal
Professional freelance writer and content strategist
Influencer marketing, to me is one of my most used marketing strategy.
I am a freelance writer and content strategist and I owe most of my clients to influencer marketing.
Here is how I leveraged influencer marketing for getting backlinks, clients and traffic (that once crashed my site):
Influencers or leaders or even commonly experts in a field are the ones people have a respect for.
They have built their credibility by years of expertise and work in their field.
When an influencer recommends a product or service, the default value of the product raises manifold.
My strategies include:
Linking to their content: Almost every influencer or internet marketer (in our field) loves to be appreciated for his work.
You can do so by linking to their content or referring it in an article of yours.
When I linked to AnaHoffman’s content, she not only it but also linked that article of mine on curing wrIter’s block on her subsequent article.
This gave me an authority backlink, some real exposure and a chunk of traffic.
TIPS FOR READERS:
Link to articles that are relevant to your niche otherwise your audience will lose trust on you.
After the publishing, don’t just wait for pingbacks to alert the influencer.
Write a personalized email letting him or her know that you have linked to their article.
Building genuine relationships through social media: One of the major mistakes newbies make is to search for an influencer in their places of hangouts.
If you want to build genuine relationships with influencers in your niche, hangout at places they prefer.
Then, interact with them, start genuine conversations and leverage their large audience to market your products and gain exposure.
In my example,
I started looking for influencers in my niche i.e. social media marketing.
Naturally, Mari Smith, the Facebook queen has a large following on both twitter and Facebook.
I started interacting with her and building genuine connection.
After that, I wrote a post on Facebook marketing strategies for small businesses.
I sent her a tweet asking if she thinks that my post fits her audience.
She was prompt to share it across her social networks.
As a reward for my quality blog post she also mentioned it on her newsletter, and linked it to her article on her blog.
This exposure gave my humble blog a “hug of traffic” that crashed my servers for a while (and I am happy for this).
Eventually the post also landed me some lucrative writing projects.
TIPS FOR READERS:
Try to build genuine relationships with influencers or they will soon detect your selfish motives.
No influencers will ever promote something that is not worth their audience so make sure you present your best blog post, product etc to them.
Thank them for their help.
This will take the relationship further and help you in the near future.
Dom Wells
Founder of HumanProofDesigns.com
I’ve said it many times before, and I’m sure I will say it again.
I can draw a straight line from the day I started outreach, to the success HumanProofDesigns has now.
Before outreach, I found it hard to get traction and get any attention or customers at all. It was a struggle.
However, once I started to connect with other bloggers and feature them, and link to them, things started to happen for me quite rapidly.
I started out by doing expert roundup posts posts like this one on link building.
I also began to leave comments on other blogs, sign up to their email lists, and from time to time, email them and get in touch.
It was slow going at first, a lot of people simply ignored me, but slowly and surely people started to notice me.
After a while, people started linking to me themselves, and including me in THEIR expert roundups, which was very cool. Empire Flippers mentioned me in a couple of their podcasts, and even added me to their autoresponder sequence as a resource.
One thing I noticed was that traffic that came from these mentions tended to be well qualified, and a lot of my early niche website sales came directly from other influencers mentioning me.
As time has gone by and more and more people started to reference me, feature me, and generally mention me, more and more people have approached me for features.
More customers come knocking, and people link to me all the time. A few months ago I was featured in an article on Entrepreneur.com, and that came about as a direct result of outreach and influencer marketing.
There’s no question about it.
I recently checked to see which traffic source earned me the most sales, and of course, it was referral traffic.
This is the power of influencer marketing. I wish I’d started it sooner.
Tim Soulo
Marketing guy at Ahrefs and Blogs on BloggerJet
I guess you’re well aware of the “expert roundup” articles that pop everywhere, right?
Well, here at Ahrefs we’ve decided to join that craze and publish an expert roundup of our own.
We’ve reached out to 100+ marketers and gathered 90 responses. Was that post successful?
Go take a look at the numbers on our social buttons: Monster Roundup: 90 SEO Experts Talk White Hat Link Building, Outsourcing And Scaling
To be 100% honest with you, we hired a person to do all the work of finding these influencers and reaching out to them.
But if I were to do that on my own, I would totally use some software like NinjaOutreach to automate things, because sending 100+ manual outreach emails sounds totally crazy to me.
Sick of “expert roundups”?
No problem!
You can try “The Drip Technique” by Gregory Ciotti.
Write a post like you usually do, and then reach out to a few key influencers and ask them for a relevant quote that you will plug into your article.
That won’t be an “expert roundup”, but the fact that these influencers contributed a quote to your article means that they are very likely to tweet it afterwards.
Influencers don’t respond to your emails?
Why don’t you ask them for a very short quote on Twitter?
This is cool for two reasons:
1. Responding to your tweet doesn’t look like a huge time investment, so a lot of influencers will do that straight away.
2. Since their responses will be “tweet-sized“, you can embed them as “tweetable quotes” into your article, which will skyrocket your shares.
I use my own WordPress plugin called TweetDis to create these fancy-looking “tweetable quotes” on my own blog: http://screencast.com/t/p3NMNG9N Asking influencers to contribute to your article is a very powerful tactic. And there’s no excuse to ignoring it!
Ross Marchant
Marketing Manager for BrightLocal
At BrightLocal we try to grow the company in two distinct areas.
The first is by constantly evolving our product & striving to make the best Local SEO Tools on the market.
We do this by talking to our customers & inviting feedback about which new features & updates we should prioritise to make their lives easier.
Secondly, we try to grow our brand by producing noteworthy and unique content in the form of research, surveys, webinars & other key industry features.
As a B2B company, our customers are typically well-informed & in many cases advanced SEOs, so it’s useful for us to be able to leverage the power of industry experts to ensure that the content we’re producing can benefit everyone – regardless of their level of expertise.
One such example is the Expert Citation Survey that we publish each year on the BrightLocal blog.
In the survey we enlist the help of 22 local search experts to provide their insights and opinions on the importance, the effectiveness and the relevance of local search citations.
We’re extremely grateful to those who take part, as the insights from some of the most knowledgeable figures in the local search industry really add gravitas to the survey & are hopefully beneficial to BrightLocal as a brand.
Their insights allow us to produce a piece of content that not only helps to inform our readers, but also helps to position BrightLocal as a company that is constantly looking to learn & evolve in an ever changing industry.
Thomas Smale
Co-founder at FE International and an Entrepreneur.com contributor
Being in an industry that is largely word-of-mouth and referral driven, being seen as a trusted and knowledgeable person (and therefore company) is essential.
We have consistently appeared as guest post authors, podcast guests, interviewees on blogs (such as) and regularly speak at industry events to maintain a strong reputation and be seen by as many relevant people as possible.
We have always ensured we are not too reliant on one source of leads or reliant on one off spikes.
Consistently showing up, for a number of years, and continuously publishing good content has always worked well for us.
The best leads are where clients actively recommend us – so our best example would actually not be something we did ourselves, it would be from our happy clients who are more than happy to tell their business associates about us.
Jock Purtle
Owner of Digitalexits, Health and Fitness Enthusiast
Being in the high end consulting field we use influencer marketing to gain credibility in the market place to sell our product.
We leverage other peoples audiences where we let them position us as the expert in our chosen field.
We also leverage other peoples brands like Forbes.com, Inc.com, Entrepreneur.com to add credibility to the business.
Also by being featured in podcasts, writing guest posts and articles alsobuilds our SEO authority in Google and helps us rank for our main keywords to drive qualified leads to our website.
Jon Dykstra
Fat Stacks Entrepreneur
By far the best method with B2B blogs such as Fat Stacks Entrepreneur to build my brand AND sell products is to showcase results.
In fact, reported results with accompanying proof does the selling. In my case, it’s showcasing my results as a niche website publisher.
For any business hoping to attract more business, success stories and case studies are amazing selling tools.
With respect to B2C websites, blogs and brands, I find providing an excellent product does the trick on its own.
An excellent product, which in my case is both informative and entertaining content, works very well because my readers share it extensively and return frequently.
This engagement helps with organic traffic and growing my audiences.
Mi Muba
Veteran media professional, Marketer and Blogger
It is generally said that creating good opinion of others about you is not so difficult.
The damn difficult task is to tell public how great views many influencers have about you.
So the main task is to do your own image building in first go and then tell your target audience how influencers think about you and your brand.
Initially while starting my money blog I tried to strengthen my relations with industry leaders whom I was already in touch with.
I got their opinion on each and every step I took to build my blog.
Meanwhile I also built relationships with other pro bloggers who I think would support my blog as soon as I influence them with the awesomeness of my various blogging sub-products including contents, layout, design and customer care.
I did not stop here and keep exploring new ways and means to expand my relationship base and instead of seeking just one favor from an influencer I try to build long term relations with most of them and as a result many of them supported me without my asking to them and I got huge benefits of branding because of their positive word of mouth about me.
I also wrote a few posts to make them believe I am not just another blogger and do extensive homework before writing a post.
These are a few of the posts that show my vast vision about blogging.
100 seductive ways to get more comments on your blog
119 concrete reasons why you must build your blog community
How she died while struggling to become a pro blogger?
The best way to leverage influencer marketing is to participate in every noticeable activity in your niche be it online or offline and accessible to you.
In this way your industry leaders would recognize you a responsible, serious brand with long-term objectives of delivering your level best to your target market.
This is the basic requirement to be popular in your industry and become one of the industry leaders.
Gael Breton
Founder of Authority Hacker
I usually give free exposure to influencers to start a relationship then let them know about it and shover value to them until the relationship is pushed to a point where I can ask for something back.
This works particularly well with things like roundup posts and then helping these people with their websites.
I’ve made friends with people much bigger than me that way and it’s something that even those who understand what you’re doing can’t say no to because it’s actually good for them.
Dennis Seymour
Dennis Seymour is an SEO and an entrepreneur
Influencer marketing is VERY important and VERY fun at the same time. It’s always a bread and butter for any marketing campaign.
We do this differently based on the goal of the campaign. For fashion related products, we leverage fashion bloggers and their reach.
This means millions of possible eye balls spread across their social accounts and blog readership.
For our company blog, the most recent campaign we did was to leverage the reach of influencers in our niche.
This is mainly to promote a post with the main goal of getting at least 500 subscribers.
We created this SEO checklist and planned to give it away as part of our evergreen post with a lead magnet that has an actual checklist plus bonus stuff that weren’t in the main infographic.
We’re a pretty new name in the space so most of the long time influencers don’t know us.
We basically had to work our way up the chain and targeted influencers that were easier to reach out to.
Once we got their cooperation, we reached out to the next tier.
In many cases, they already shared the content without us reaching out because they saw it from a fellow influencer.
We got to build some new relationships and it’s been awesome ever since.
As for the goal, we hit the signup number within the first week.
To be exact, 3 days actually. Right now, it sits at 3.2k shares, ranking on the 2nd page and it’s still bringing us traffic and signups.
It wouldn’t have gotten there this quickly without the help of influencers.
Joel Runyon
Founder of Impossible Ventures
My main goal is to tell good stories.
If you’re able to build a good story (whether that’s a case study, a personal anecdote or even a story about a problem that your service solves), it’s incredibly easy to get people to write about it, link to it and tell their friends.
The hard part is creating and doing something worth talking about in the first place.
So, instead of worrying about specific outreach tactics, work on crafting the story to make it irresistible.
Vladimir Gendelman
Founder and CEO at CompanyFolders
Our content caters to graphic designers, who are influencers in the print industry.
We make sure the content answers questions they are asking in an in-depth way no one else is, and we provide content that helps them do their jobs better.
If you provide influencers with content that is useful to them instead of producing self-promotions and product reviews, they are more likely to share it.
