There are millions of blogs on the Internet today which means that it’s become nearly impossible to find new niches. Even if you are able to find one, it may fail to attract enough organic visitors. This is why you need to stick to those that are already popular and use different kinds of marketing methods to get your name known. Influencers marketing is one of them.
Influencer marketing works- there are countless case studies that you can get online to confirm that. However, the key to its success is finding top niche influencers and getting them interested in working with you. The question is, how do you do that?
The easiest way to find influencers is to find users who are already sharing content similar to yours. For instance, if a user is actively sharing posts like “how green tea helps in controlling obesity”, and “5 simple exercises for weight loss that you can try at home”, then they are also likely to share a post like “10 foods to avoid if you want to lose weight”. So, if you want the best influencers, then just follow these steps:
1. Find Similar Content That has Good Following
Thanks to Google, it’s not that hard to find blogs that publish quality content on topics that you cover. For instance, if you write posts about branding, then you can use phrases like “top branding techniques for small businesses”, “affordable logo makers online”, etc. in Google Search. You will be able to find a slew of blogs that have published similar content.
You can also use a dedicated tool like Topsy to find older posts that enjoyed a high level of engagement. It scans billions of tweets in its index to identify and provide those that are relevant to you. This way you can find posts that receive tons of shares.
2. Identify the Content Creators
Once you have identified content that’s both relevant and popular, you can find the users who have created it on the platforms. You can use Bitly to do that with ease. All you need to do is copy the URL of a post and enter it in Bitly to make it shorter by pasting it in the area where it says “paste a link area” and hitting the Enter button. A popup will appear with the shortened URL and there will be a link called “View Stats”. Clicking the same will take you to a page where you can check the details of the traffic that visited the post through Bitly links. You can also learn about the users who responded well to the post at the bottom of the page.
With Bitly stats, you can check how many clicks each user was able to generate with their connections. You can create a list of the users that sent a large number of visitors to the links. These are the ones that you need to target afterward.
3. Get them to “Influence”
Now that you have identified the users that are potential influencers, you can now approach them in a way they are willing to share your posts with others. This isn’t as easy as it sounds.
When you reach out to potential influencers, you may not get more than one attempt at getting them to share. So, you should choose your approach wisely. For instance, it’s a good idea to get in touch with them before you ask them to share your post. This idea is already proven (kind of) in a Moz case study, in which it was found that those with whom you have minimal contact are 63% likely to share a post against those who you have no contact at all who are only 18% likely to share the same.
A simple way to interact with the influencers is to send an email. You can drop a comment on social media profiles asking if they have a blog. When they respond with affirmation, then you can urge them to share your post with others. You also need to give them a good reason to do this. For instance, you can tell them that it answers some of the questions they asked in their own post, or that it can inform their readers about a subject that they have shown interest in previously.
Easier Options
Finding the perfect niche influencers for your blog is a challenging task. However, you can’t just pick any random users to promote your brand. For best results, you have to invest time to find users that are relevant and can help in making your blog more visible. Otherwise, you can also take help from a professional influencer marketing service provider who can do all the legwork for you. In fact, a number of top bloggers work with these services only as they want to work on content creation rather than marketing which is a time and labor-intensive task.